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FLASHES 



FROM 



ii 



QUID A." 



COMPILED 

BY 

J. L. S. 



'%'. 




NEW YORK: 

G, JV, Carle ton & Co,, Publishers. 



LONDON : S. LOW & CO. 
MDCCCLXXXIV. 






h^ 



Copyright, 1883, 

BY 

Josephine L. Snow. 



stereotyped by 

Samuel Stoddbb, 

42 Dbt Street, N. Y. 



DEDICA TION. 



" They who can not weave an uniform 
web, may, at least, produce a piece of patch- 
work^ wliicJi may be useful, and not zvithout a 
charm of its ownT 

y, L. S, 

Habtford, Conn., Dec, 1888. 



FLASHES FROM "OUIDA." 



" 'T^HE sea Is not free," he said. It 

X obeys the laws that govern it, and 

cannot evade them. Its flux and reflux 

are not hberty, but obedience — just such 

obedience to natural law as our life shows 

when it springs into being, and slowly 

wears itself out, and then perishes in its 

human form, to live again in the motes of 

the air and the blades of the grass. There 

Is no such thing as liberty ; men have 

dreamed of it, but nature has never 

accorded it. 

Folle-Farine. 

7 



8 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THERE is no knife that cuts so 
sharply, and with such poisoned 

blade, as treachery. 

In Maremma, 



THE influence of a woman's intelli- 
gence on the male intellects about 
her is as the churn to the cream ; it can 
either enrich and utilize it, or impoverish 

and waste.it. 

Puck, 



WHEN she smiled, her smile was 
soft and sudden, like the smile 
of one who hears fair tidings in her heart 

unspoken. 

Folle-Farine, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 9 

I BELIEVE, with the Persians, that 
ten measures of talk were sent down 
from heaven, and the ladies took nine. 
Granville De Vigne, 



PRAYER, even if it have no other issue 
or effect, rarely fails to tranquillize 
and fortify the heart which is lifted up, 
ever so vaguely, in searcho f superhuman 

aid. 

Wanda, 



ALL the memories of the past were 
thronging about him like brothers 
and sisters giving welcome from long 

absence. 

In Maremma, 



lo FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA: 



ROME is still beautiful ; and the Past 
is all about you in it. It is like an 
intaglio that has been lying in the sand 
for a score of centuries. You may rub 
the dust away ; then the fine and noble 
lines of the classic face show clearly still. 
Rome will not give her secrets up at the 
first glance ; only wait a little while, and 
see the moon shine on It all a night or two, 
and you will learn to love her better in 
her colossal ruin than even you have loved 
the marble and ivory cities of your dreams, 
for there is nothing mean or narrow here : 
the vauhs, the domes, the stairs, the courts, 
the waters, the hills, the plains, the sculp- 
ture, the very light itself — they are all wide, 
and vast and noble, and man himself dilates 
in them, gains stature and soul, as it were — 
one scarce knows how — and, some way, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr ii 

looks nearer God in Rome than ever else- 
where. 

Ariadne, 



THE normal state of man is to want 
money. 

Under Two Flags. 



THE only way to gain confidence is 
never to excite suspicion. 

Beatrice Boville, 



THE world is like whist ; reading can't 
teach.it. 



Moths. 



12 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A. 



THE water is a mirror. I can see my 
own soul in it, and nature's ; per- 
haps one hopes even, sometimes, to see 

God's. 

Wanda, 



DEATH, like night, can be welcome 
only to the weary. 

Under Two Flags, 



TO keep one's own opinion is a cheap 
pleasure, and a sweet one. 

Ariadne, 



SUPERSTITION is a sort of parody 
of faith. 

Wanda. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 13 



HE aged will never remember that 
the youth which they love will 
escape from them — will die out of their 
sight into its own cell-absorbed ego. 

Tricotrin, 



T 



I HARDLY think marriage so en- 
joyable an institution as some 
writers do, but, perhaps, a little like a pipe 
of opium, of which the dreams are better 

than the awakening." 

Beatrice Boville, 



FAIR faiths are the blossoms of life. 
When the faith drops, Spring is 

over. 

Signa, 



14 FLASHES FROM ''OUlDAr 

ALL greatest gifts that have enriched 
the modern world have come from 
Italy. Take those gifts from the world, 
and it would lie in darkness, a dumb, bar- 
baric, joyless thing. 

Pascaral, 



BOREDOM is the ill-natured pebble 
that always will get in the golden 
slipper of the pilgrim of pleasure. 

In a Winter City, 



HER eyes were left her, and with 
them women speak in a universal 

tongue. 

Sir Galahad's Raid, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 15 

THE deepest charm of those old gar- 
dens, as of their country, is, after all, 
that in them it is impossible to forget the 
present age. In the full, drowsy, volup- 
tuous noon, when they are a gorgeous 
blaze of color, and a very intoxication of 
frao-rance, as in the ethereal white moon- 
light of midnight ; when, with the silver 
beams and the white blossoms and the pale 
marbles, they are like a world of snow, 
their charm is one of rest, silence, leisure, 
dreams, and passion, all in one ; they be- 
long to the days when art was a living 
power, when love was a thing of heaven or 
of hell, and when men had the faith of 

children and the force of gods. 

Signa. 



SUCCESS never sins. 
Signa. 



1 6 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



H 



ER Instincts were all true, but to 
reason on them was beyond her. 
In Maremma. 



SHE had no disappointment because 
she had no hope. 

Folle-Farine, 



w 



HAT false step is ever to be re- 
trieved ? 

Strathmore, 



ENJOYMENT Is not to be gained 
by reflecting that to enjoy is our 

duty. 

Moths. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 17 

WHERE passion enters, all worlds 
have the same law ! You have 
made me learn the same madness as an 
Israelite learnt from Mariamne a thousand 
years ago, as twice a thousand a Spartan 

learnt from Cleonice. 

Strathmore, 



LIVING death is worse than the death 
of the grave — that living death 
when the voice speaks still to all others 

and is only silent to you. 

Pascarel, 



H 



ER picture kept me silent company. 
A Provence Rose, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA. 



TO youth belongs ineffable graces all 
its own, and charms never to be 
counterfeited when youth has passed away ; 
hope and faith and the freshness of un- 
broken illusions are with it ; it has the 
bloom as of the untouched fruit, the charm 
as of the half-open flower ; it is rich in the 
treasures of untried years, and strong in 
the insolence of its beauty and strength ; 
it is without suspicion and without fear, 
but also it is without sympathy ; it is glo- 
rious as the glory of the morning ; but he 
who seeks its pity finds it hard, from pure 
joyousness of soul and ignorance of sor- 
row : its selfishness is only ignorance, but 
it is selfish. When youth is gone the 
character which has gained, from living, 
any profit, will have softened and mellowed 
under the suns and storms of many days ; 
with wide experience it will have wide tol- 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 19 

erations and comprehension ; its sympa- 
thies will be unfading, because It will be 
aware that to understand is to pardon, since 
for all evil there is excuse, could all influ- 
ences and motives and accidents of circum- 
stance be traced : its own past lies behind 
it, a land forever lost, and its onward path 
is dark ; it looks back so often because it 
has not heart to look forward, since all it 
sees is death : many are the graves of its 
desires and its friends : it is full of pity 
for all things that breathe, because it has 
learned that nearly every breath is pain : 
there is nothing in which it can have much 
belief, but there is little to which it can 
refuse compassion, since all creation suf- 
fers : the unutterable mystery and sadness 
of all forms of life oppress it, and it hears 
the children and the lovers say '' forever," 
knowing itself, too well, that the mortal's 



20 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

"forever" Is but the gnat's day upon a 

ray of sun and breath of vapor. As thus 

with the individual character of man, so 

it is with the character of the world, and 

of those acts in which the voice of the 

world's soul speaks. 

Ariadne, 



THE world in which we live knows 
nothing of us in our best horse as 
it knows nothing of us in our worst. 

Stratkmore, 



AN age is like a climate ; the hardier 
may escape its influence in much, 
but the hardiest will not escape its influ- 
ence entirely. 

Ariadne, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 21 



EPIGRAMS are the salts of life; 
but they wither up the grasses 
of foolishness, and naturally the grasses 

hate to be sprinkled therewith. 

Puck, 



HUMAN in its sadness, more than 
human in its eloquence, now mel- 
ancholy as the Miserere that sighs 
through the gloom of a cathedral mid- 
night, now rich as the glory of the after- 
glow in Egypt, a poem beyond words, a 
prayer grand as that which seems to 
breathe from the hush of mountain soli- 
tudes when the eternal snows are lighted 
by the rising of the sun — the melody of 
the violin filled the silence of the closing 

day. 

Trzcotrzn. 



22 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

HAD Israel no courtesans in her 
camps, that in the parables of her 
Scriptures she made the chief leader of 

Hell a male creature ? 

Tricotrtn, 



WE are always unamusing to one 
woman, if we are talking at all 

about another. 

Beatrice Boville, 



THE most impenetrable cynicism will 
yield and melt, and seem but a 
poor armor, when it is brought amidst the 
solemnity and solitude of the high hills. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 23 

ALL women are allured by the shad- 
ows and suggestions of what is but 

imperfectly revealed. 

Wanda. 



TO carry all that store of melody safe 
in your memory — it is like having 
sunlight and moonlight ever at command. 

Wanda. 



THE boy choristers and little children 
put their white linen and their 
scarlet robes in cupboards and presses, 
with heads of lavender and sprigs of 
rosemary, to keep the moth and the Devil 

away. 

Folle-Farine. 



24 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



THE treasures of scholarship are sweet 
to all who open them, but they are, 
perhaps, sweetest of all to a girl that has 
been led both by habit and nature to seek 
them. The soul of a girl, whilst passions 
sleep, desires are unknown, and self-con- 
sciousness lies unawakened, can lose itself 
in the impersonal as no male student can. 
The mightiness and beauty of past ages 
become wonderful and all-sufficient to it, 
as they can never do to a youth beset by 
the stinging fires of impending manhood. 
The very element of faith and imagina- 
tion, hereafter its weakness, becomes the 
strength of the girl-scholar. The very 
abandonment of self, which later on will 
fling her to Sappho's death or mure her 
in the cell of Heloise, will make her 
find a cloudless and all-absorbing happi- 
ness in the meditations of great minds, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 25 

with myths of heroic ages, in the delicate 
intricacies of language, and in the im- 
measurable majesties of thought. The 
evil inseparable from all knowledge will 
pass by her unfelt ; the greatness only at- 
tainable by knowledge will lend her per- 
fect and abiding joys. 

Friendship, 



YOU have taught her to scorn a He — 
you could not arm her with a better 

shield. 

Tricotrin, 



L 



OVE is sympathy, and sympathy is 
intelligence in a strong degree. 

Signa, 



26 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A." 



WERE we all what we are in our 
holiest moments, we were God- 
like. 

Trzcolrtn, 



CHILDREN take good and evil as 
the birds take rain and sunshine. • 

Szgna. 



L 



IKING does not go by reason nor 
follow after merit. 

Szgna, 



THE charm of perfect silence fell on 
the grand old garden. 

Szgna. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 27 



W 



E pardon sin ; we do not pardon 

baseness. 

Wanda, 



VERYBODY has ambition. 

Lady Maraboufs Tro^Mes, 



IF we all published our memoirs, the 
world would have a droll book. 

Under Two Flags, 



s 



EPARATION is a sort of death. 
Do not let us tempt death by it. 

Wanda, 



28 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

IF you loved, would you talk of obe- 
dience ? In love two wills move to- 
gether, inspired by one soul, as the two 
wings of a bird move ever apart, yet ever 

in union. 

Tricotrin, 



SHE was arrayed in white, with a 
tender blending about it of all the 
blues in creation, from that of a summer 
day to that of a lapis lazuli ring. 

Moths, 



THE alpenstock of the tourist is to 
the everlasting hills what railway 
metals are to the plains. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 29 

THERE is nothing so vain as the 
azalea — except, Indeed, a camelHa, 
which Is the most conceited flower In the 
world, though, to do It justice. It Is also the 
most Industrious, for It Is busy getting 
ready Its next winter's buds whilst the 
summer Is still hot and broad on the land, 
which Is much to be commended. 

The Ambitious Rose-tree, 



G 



RAY and opal hues were cast over 
the land by passing clouds. 

In Maremma. 



N 



OTHING kills young creatures like 
the bitterness of waiting. 

BSSe. 



30 FLASHES FROM " OUIDAr 

FOR the song that we hear with our 
ears Is only the song that is sung 
in our hearts. 

Ariadne- 



" T F you loved her that was, forever ; 
JL just because she is dead, is that a 
reason to change '^ " 

In Maremma, 



FOR she dreamed of her Father's 
kingdom, a kingdom which no 
man denies to the creature that has 
beauty and youth, and is poor and yet 
proud, and is of the sex of its mother. 

Folle-Farine. 



SELECTIONS EROM ''QUID A,' 31 



THE pity which is not born from 
experience is always cold. It can- 
not help being so ; it does not understand. 

Friendship, 



M 



AYBE those women are happiest 
who easily deceive themselves. 

Puck, 



MEN barter their good blood nowa- 
days ; soiling the scutcheon don't 
matter, if they gild over the dirt. We 
don't sell our souls to the Devil in this age, 
we're too Christian ; we sell them to the 
dollar ! 

Strathmore, 



32 SELECTIONS FROM '' OUIDAr 

IN nature there are millions of gorgeous 
hues to a scarcity of neutral tints, 
yet the pictures that are painted in sombre 
semi-tones and have no one positive color 
in them, are always pronounced the near- 
est to nature. When a painter sets his 
palette he does not approach the gold of 
the sunset and dawn of the flame of the 

pomegranate and poppy. 

Friendship. 



M 



USIC is the very voice of God 

himself amidst men. 

Pascarel. 



N 



AMELESS melodious sounds ech- 
oed from tree to tree. 

Signa. 



SELECTIONS FROM ''OUIDAr 33 

TH E true art is, know how to hold 
truth and how to withhold it, but 
never to deal with anything else. 

Strathmore, 



A CONSCIENCE that is sluggish, 
fitful, sleepy, and feeble, but not 
wholly dead, is a terrible drawback to 
comfort and an impediment to success. 

Moths, 



WE seat our foes at our board, and 
welcome what we hate to our hospi- 
tality, and eat salt with those who betray 
us and those whom we betray. 

Strathmore, 



34 SELECTIONS FROM '' GUIDAr 

CITY of PLEASURE you have called 
Paris, and with truth; but why not 
also City of the Poor? For what city, like 
herself, has remembered the poor in her 
pleasure, and given to them, no less than 
to the richest, the treasures of her laugh- 
ing sunlight, of her melodious music, of 
her gracious hues, of her million flowers, 
of her shady leaves, of her divine ideals ? 
Oh, world ! when you let Paris die, you let 
your last youth die with her ! Your rich 
will mourn a paradise deserted, but your 
poor will have need to weep with tears of 
blood for the ruin of the sole Eden whose 
sunlicrht sought them in their shadow, 
whose music found them in their loneli- 
ness, whose glad green ways were open to 
their tired feet, whose radiance smiled the 
sorrow from their aching eyes, and in 
whose wildest errors and whose vainest 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 35 



dreams their woes and needs were unfor- 

gotten. 

A Provence Rose, 



w 



HEN we hold the chisel ourselves, 

are we not secure to have no error 

in the work ? 

Strathmore. 



SIGN A laughed all over his little face 
as a brook does when the sun and 

wind together please it. 

Signa. 



A 



SIN confessed is half atoned. 

Trent-et-UTU 



36 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

THE humility of a proud nature has in 
it an homage the most sincere and 
the most exquisite in flattery that human 

nature holds. 

hi Maremma, 



THE quaint old houses seemed all 
asleep, with the shutters closed like 
eyelids over their little, dim, aged orbs of 

windows. 

Folle-Fari7ie. 



ALL things must suffer, and must think, 
-^~^ since all thinofs dread and trust. 
Can there be fear without mental torture ? 
Can there be trust without emotional 
power ? 

Puck 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 37 

THE robins have a pretty air of bold- 
ness with which they veil their real 
shyness and timidity. 

Folle-Farine, 



PERHAPS he can take better care of 
his own soul because he cannot lend 
one to a spinet. 

Wanda, 



WITH all the love one has, one 
never loves anything like one's 
self! What a supreme joy it is — that 
knowing one's self fair ! But there is still 
greater joy than that : it is to hear the 
world say so. 

Tricotrin, 



38 FLASHES FROM '^ OUIDAr 



F 



EMI NINE natures are things so 

mutable ! 

Truotrzn, 



OR want of a word, lives often drift 

apart. 

/;/ Marem^na, 



H 



ABIT is nothincr better than a har- 
ness, even when it is silvered. 

In a Winter City, 



I THINK when one loves any other 
very much, one becomes for him 
altogether unlike what one is to the world. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



39 



ALL lands are soulless where the olive 
does not lift its consecrated boughs 
to Heaven. For the olive is always 
mournful ; it is, amidst trees, as the opal 
among jewels ; its foliage, and its flowers, 
and its fruits, are all colorless ; it shivers 
softly as though it were cold even on 
those sun-bathed hills ; it seems forever 
to say '' peace, peace," when there is no 
peace ; and to be weary because that 
whereof it is the emblem has been ban- 
ished from earth, because men's souls 
delight in war. The landscape that has 
the olive is spiritual, as no landscape can 
ever be from which the olive is absent ; 
for where is there spirituality without 
some hue of sadness ? 

Pascarel. 



40 FLASHES FROM '' OUlDAr 

PLEASURE Is but labor to those who 
do not know, also, that labor, in its 

turn, is pleasure. 

Trzcolrzn, 



G 



RANTED wishes are sometimes 

self-sown curses. 

Tricotrin, 



PHILOSOPHY is the pomegranate 
of life, ever cool and most fragrant ; 
and the deeper you cut in it, the richer 
only will the core grow. Power is the 
Dead-sea apple, golden and fair to sight 
while the hand strives to reach it ; dry 
gray ashes between dry fevered lips when 
once it is grasped and eaten. 

Tricotrin. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 41 



W 



HAT a disagreeable obligation 

dining is ! 

Wanda. 



IT is wonderful how few are the actual 
wants of a human life that is far 
away from all artificial stimulus and ne- 
cessities. 

In Maremma, 



T 



HE world likes talent which serves 
it — it hates genius, which rules it. 
Folle-Farine. 



ALL that was evil in him had leaped 
up like a lion from his lair, and now 
could never more be drugged to sleep. 

Strathmore, 



42 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

IF a person's epigram or argument be 
pointless or involved, you shouldn't 
show him that you think so by asking him 

what he means. 

Puck, 



*' 1\ /TEN and women are just like 
IVX sheep." A crack of the whip, and 
they scatter. They never stay by one 
that falls on the road. 

A Village Commune. 



HIS eyes had a great darkness and 
yet a great fire in them, as the 
skies have when, behind the purple rain- 
clouds, flash the lightnings. 

A Village Commune, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 43 



FOR his character was one of those 
in which cruelty is twin-born with 
suffering, which, having tasted of crime as 
the tiger of blood, sucks more, and blots 
out sin by sin. 

Strathmore, 



M 



ONEY runs away so fast, when it 
has no companion in your drawer. 
A Village Comimme, 



THERE are moments in human life 
which transform men to fiends, 
leaving them no likeness of themselves ; 
moments in which the bond-slave goaded 
to insanity, turns and rends his tyrant. 

Sfrathmore, 



44 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

MEN strike at what they hate; 
women, more subtle, and more 
merciless, strike at what is best beloved 
by the life they would destroy. 

Strathnwre, 



"k 



RE you mad?" is an inevitable 
question addressed to genius. 



Under Tzuo Flags, 



WHATEVER the future may say 
of Gounod, this it will never be 
able to deny, that he is the supreme mas- 
ter of the utterance of Love. 

Afotks. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 45 

SHE saw the sea! Before her dazzled 
sight all Its beauty stretched, the 
blueness of the waters meeting the bliie- 
ness of the skies : radiant, with all the 
marvels of its countless hues ; softly 
stirred by a low wind that sighed across it ; 
bathed in a glow of gold that streamed on 
It from the westward ; rolling from north 
to south in slow, sonorous measures, fill- 
ing the silent air with melody. The lustre 
of the sunset beamed upon it ; the cool 
fresh smell of its water shot like new life 
through all the scorch and stupor of the 
day; its white foam curled and broke on 
the brown curving rocks and wooded 
inlets of the shores ; — innumerable birds, 
that gleamed like silver, floated or flow 
above its surface ; — all was still, still as 
death, save only for the endless move- 
ment of those white swift wings and the 



46 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

susurrus of the waves, In which all meaner 

and harsher sounds of earth seemed lost 

and hushed to slumber and to silence. 

The sea alone reigned, as it reigned in 

the sweet young years of the earth, when 

men were not ; as maybe it will, in its 

turn, reign again in the years to come, 

when men and all their works shall have 

passed away, and be no more seen nor 

any more remembered. 

Folle-Farine, 



SHE found God In all things, and 
found poems In all things, from the 
lowliest flower to the darkest storm. 

Strath77iore, 



w 



INE openeth the heart of man. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 47 



YOU can describe a picture, but not a 
statue. Marble is like music : it can 
never be measured or told in words. 

Ariadne. 



A 



RE the angels all dead, that tend 
the stars T 

In Maremma. 



TTER influence not genuine if not 



destined to be very enduring. 

Ptcck, 



H 



ER world was narrowed to one 
human life. 

In Maremma. 



48 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THE future is something that one 
never has, and that never comes, 
muttered the old man — something that 
one possesses in one's sleep, and that is 
farther off each time that one awakes, and 
yet a thing that one sees always — sees 
even when one lies a-dying, they say, for 

men are fools. 

Folle-Farine. 



nnn 



E dust of death is always the breath 

of life. 

F olle-F arine. 



ALL love, if it be worth anything, is 
higher than the nature that be- 
gets it. 

PascareL 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 49 

THE green corn uncurling underneath 
the blossoming vines. The vine 
follaofe that tosses, climbs and colls In 
league on league of verdure. The breast- 
high grasses, full of gold, red, and purple, 
from the countless flowers growing with It. 
The millet filled with crimson gladlola 
and great scarlet popples. The hill-sides 
that look a sheet of rose-color where the 
luplnelll is In bloom. The tall plumes of 
the canes, new-born, by the side of every 
stream and rivulet. The ocean spray of 
Arbutus Acacia shedding Its snow against 
the cypress darkness. The dreamy blue 
of the Iris lilies rising underneath the olives, 
and aloug the edges of the fields. The 
soft, pretty, quiet pictures, where mowers 
sweep down with their scythes the reedy 
grasses on the river banks : where the 
gates of the villas stand wide open with 



50 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA: 



the sun aslant upon the grassy paths be- 
neath the vines : where in the gloom of the 
house archways the women stand plaiting 
their straw, with the broad shining fields 
before them, all alive with the song of the 
grill : where the gray, savage walls of a 
fortress tower on the spur of the moun- 
tains, above the delicate green of the 
young oaks and the wind-stirred fans of 
the fig-trees : Where, deep in that fresh, 
glad tumult of leaf and blossom and 
bough, the children and the goats lie to- 
gether, while the wild thyme and the tre- 
foil are in flower, and the little dog-rose is 
white among the maize : where the beaks 
of the galley-like boats cut dark against 
the yellow current, and the great filmy 
square nets are cast outward where the 
poplar shadows tremble in the stream — all 
these, and a thousand like them, are yours 



FLASHES FROM ''QUID A." 51 

in the sweet May season among the 

Tuscan hills and vines. 

PascareL 



A 



ND what is oblivion, if it be not age ? 

PascareL 



I SHOULD hardly care for a fealty 
which was only to be retained by con- 
stant presence. 

Wanda, 



THERE is something quaint, pathetic, 
touching, in the lives that begin and 
end in solitary places. 

In Maremma, 



52 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

NOTHING on earth is so pleasant 
as being a little in love ; nothing 
on earth is so destructive as being too 
much so. 

Under Two Flags, 



ONE weeps for the death of children ; 
but perhaps the change of them in- 
to callous men and worldly women is a 
sadder thing to see, after all. 

Moths!^ 



VERSE, to the Italian, is as natural as 
laughter to the child or tears to 
the woman. 

PascdLveL 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 53 

WHO did, indeed, first name the flow- 
ers ? Who first gave them, not 
their Latin titles, but the old, familiar, 
fanciful, poetic, rustic ones, that run so 
curiously alike in all the different vulgar 
tongues? Who first called the lilies of 
the valley the Madonna's tears ? the wild 
hyacinth St. Dorothy's flowers? Who 
first called the red clusters of the olean- 
der St. Joseph's nosegays? and the cle- 
matis by her many lovely titles — consola- 
tion, traveler's joy, virgin's bower? Who 
first made dedication of the narcissus to 
remembrance ? the amaranthus to wound- 
ed, bleeding love ? the scabious to the 
desolation of widowhood? It is strange 
that most of these tender old appellatives 
are the same in meaning in all European 
tongues. Milton, Spenser and Shelley — 
Tasst), Schiller and Camoens — all the 



54 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

poets that ever the world has known, 
miaht have been summoned too^ether for 
the baptism of the flowers, and have failed 
to name them half so well as popular tra- 
dition has done, long ago in the dim, lost 
ages, with names that still make all the 
world akin. It is a fancy that St. John 
had named them all one day, out of glad- 
ness of heart, when Christ had kissed 

him. 

Signa. \ 



SHE was a woman who lived upon 
vanity and adored but herself, a 
creature like a Japan lilac, lovely to look 
upon, but to those v/ho lingered near, who 
touch or who play with her, certain de- 
struction. 

Strathmore. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 55 

THE greatness of a poet lies in the 
universality of his sympathies; and 
women are not sympathetic, because they 
are intensely self-centred. 

Puck, 



A GREAT purpose nerves the life it 
lives in, so that no personal terrors 
can assail, nor any minor woes afflict it. 

Folle-Farine, 



THE river was all golden and green 
in the late afternoon ; here and 
there was the red flame of a knot of tulips ; 
a lovely silence and radiance were over all 
the scene as the sun sank to its setting. 
A Village Commune, 



56 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDA: 



T 



HE poet should use the suffering of 
others for his lamp. 

Ariadne, 



FREINDSHIP, when it is not a bully, 
is very commonly a coward. 

Puck, 



BEFORE her was the maze of the 
poppy-fields. In the moonlight their 
blossoms, so gorgeous at sunset or at 
noon, lost all their scarlet gaud and pur- 
ple pomp, and drooped like discrowned 
kings stripped bare in the midnight of 
calamity. 

Folle-Farifie, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 57 

WHEN sorrow has once been upon 
us, we have no longer faith in 
life — we have but Hope ; and Hope, God- 
given as she is, is but fearful, flattering, 
evanescent, at best. 

Granville De Vzgne. 



CHANCE and circumstance may be 
controlled or altered, but the fates 
which men make for themselves always 
abide with them, for good or ill. 

Wanda, 



WHEN one loves art, it is the love 
of the creator and of the offspring 
both in one. 

Ariadne. 



58 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



C 



ON TENT is ignorance. 

Ariadne, 



HE is a man who has the capacity for 
great things, but he seemed to me 
to be his worst enemy ; if he had fewer 
gifts, he might probably have more 
achievement. A waste of power is always 

a melancholy sight. 

Wanda. 



ART, if it be anything is the perpetual 
/~V uplifting of what is beautiful in the 
sight of the multitudes — the perpetual 
adoration of that loveliness, material and 
moral, which men in the haste and greed 
of their lives are everlastingly forgetting. 

Ariadne, 



s 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 59 



HE was a creature half divine, from 
strength and innocence combined. 
In Maremma. 



o 



H, if we could be sure that unceas- 
ing regret consoled the dead ! 

Wanda, 



THE highest trust, to my thinking, 
that one human life can show in 
another, is to believe in it. 

Under Two Flags, 



THE beatitude of confessed and 
mutual love was there. 

Puck, 



6o FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



I 



T is for the rich " to intend ;" the poor 
must take what chances. 

FoUc-Fari7ie, 



WITHOUT Rubens, what is Ant- 
werp ? A dirty, dusky, busthng 
mart, which no man should ever care to 
look upon, save the traders who do busi- 
ness on its wharves. With Rubens, to the 
whole world of men it is a sacred name, a 
sacred soil, a Bethlehem where a god of 
art saw light, a Golgotha where a god of 

art lies dead. 

A Dog of Flanders, 



N 



IGHT is the noon of poets — it is 
for rest, dream, and love. 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUTDAr 6i 

VIRTUOUS women love to take in 
hand the conversion of a sinner 
when the penitent can give them a coronet. 

StratJimore. 



KEEP innocent — innocence does not 
come back, and repentance is a 
poor thing beside it. 

Signa. 



MISERY in a lovely land like Italy ^ 
looks more sad than it does in 
sadder clines, where it is like a home- 
born thing and not an alien tyrant. 

A Village Commune, 



62 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA\ 

MAN was created a dishonest animal, 
and policy and civilization have 
raised the instinct to a science. 

StratJmiore, 



w 



HAT duller atmosphere possible 
than contentment ! 

Slraihmore. 



CAN you inform me how It Is that 
women possess tenacity of will In 
precise proportion to the frivolity of their 
lives ? 



SLAVES cannot have a future. 
Folic- Fa vine. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr (^2, 



SHE was a small, slender, beautiful 
old woman, who bound the coif 
about her head, and did her homely service 
for herself, and never stirred across her 
threshold except when early mass was 
rino-ino- over the oranore thickets ; but her 
country folk sought her far and near for 
consolation and for counsel ; in her the 
dove's gentleness and the serpent's wisdom 
were blended ; peace-making was her office, 
and none sought her who did not leave her 
simpler, purer, better, for her words of 
solace. So she dwelt for near half a cen- 
tury, the sanctity of the cloister about her, 
yet in her the warmth of human sympathy, 
the sweetness of widowed fidelity, and the 
passion of maternal love ; so she dwelt 
where the palms of the Riviera rose 
ao-ainst the blue-sea skies ; and when she 
died, ten thousand Italians followed her to 



64 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

the grave ; and to this day the country 
names her with its holiest names, for Santa 
Signa Rosa was the mother of Garibaldi. 

Pa scar el. 



I DO not believe that happiness makes 
us selfish ; it is a treason to the 
sweetest gift of life. It is when it is has 
deserted us that it grows hard to keep all 
the better things in us from dying in the 
flight. Men shut out happiness from 
their schemes for the world's virtue ; they 
might as well seek to bring flowers to 
bloom without the sun. 

C/ia7idos, 



E 



VERY error of love is lovable. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 65 

SIN added yet again to sin Is but 
barrier piled on barrier betwixt a 
soul and Its atonement. 

StratJimore, 



OBLIVION cannot be hired. 
Strathmore, 



THERE are plenty of women who 
know too much of their own sex 
ever to wonder that a man doesn't marry. 
Lady Marabout' s Troubles, 



N 



O incident on earth could ever 
have found him unready. 

Moths. 

5 



66 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A." 

HIS curse had been born of his ven- 
geance ; yet, but to crush out his 
agony, he craved vengeance yet again. 

StratJiviore, 



WE live too Httle time to do any- 
thing, even for the art we give 
our Hfe to. \\ hen we die, our work dies 
with us ; our better self must perish with 
our bodies ; the first change of fashion 
will sweep it into oblivion. Yet some- 
thing^ mav last of it ; none the less does 
the cathedral enrich Coloorne because the 
name of the man who be^^ot its beautv 
has passed unrecorded ; none the less 
is the world aided by the efforts of every 
true and daring mind because the thinker 
himself has been crushed down in the 

rush of unthinking crowds. 

Chandos, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 67 

LANDSCAPE painters are happy, I 
think ; they have a future ; there is 
much to be done, that has never been 

done in their art. 

Ariadne. 



A PIPE is a pocket philosopher, a 
truer one than Socrates, for it never 

asks questions. 

Ariadne, 



WHEN we are intimate with any 
person, it is needful to know them 
well ; what one's mere acquaintances are 
matters little ; one can no more count 
them than count the gnats on a summer 
day; but about our friends we cannot be 

too careful. 

Moths. 



68 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

WHAT could she do? Ah, nothing! 
only wait, and wait, and wait, 
with that sublime patience which is the 

heroism of some women. 

Puck. 



BE a maiden ever so innocent, she 
feels the approach of a coarse pas- 
sion, and trembles at it. though uncon- 
sciously. 



Village Covumine, 



LIFE is clay to be moulded just at 
-^ our will ; it is a fool or an unskilful 
workman, indeed, who lets it fall of itself 
into a shape he does not like, or lets it 

break in his hands. 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 69 

A SATISFIED man has nothing to 
desire, gain or content. He is a 
mould-grown carp in stagnant waters. 

Strathmore, 



SHE prayed for them half the night 
in her oratory, till her prayer seemed 
to beat against the very gates of heaven. 

Wanda. 



I WONDER to hear them say that 
Rome is sad, with all that mirth and 
music of its water laughing through all its 
streets, till the steepest and stoniest ways 
are murmurous with it as any brook-fed 
and forest depths. 

Ariadne. 



70 FLASHES FROM ^' OUJDA," 

FOR faith is as the white, pure crown 
of the century aloe, which, once cut 
down, can bloom no more within the space 
of the same lives that first rejoiced in it. 

Trzcotrtn. 



WHEN the heart is fullest of pain, 
and the mouth purest with truth, 
there is a cruel destiny in things which 
often makes the words worst chosen and 
surest to defeat the end they seek. 

Stgna, 



ANGELS stand aloof so many years, 
and then they put their fingers in 
the dough. 

* Stgna, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 71 

AT the time of the creation, when all 
except man had been made, the 
Angel of Life, who had been bidden to 
summon the world out of chaos, moving 
over the fresh and yet Innocent earth, 
thought to himself, ** I have created so 
much that Is doomed to suffer forever, and 
forever be mute! I will now create an 
animal that shall be compensated for all 
suffering by listening to the sound of his 
own voluble chatter." Whereon the 
angel called Man Into being, and cut 
the frcenum of his tongue, which has 
clacked incessantly ever since, all through 
the silence of the centuries. 

Puck. 



N 



O one can have too much candor. 
Beatrice Bovzlle. 



72 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

ONE grows to love the water that 
fills Rome with an unchanging mel- 
ody all through the year. 

Ariadne, 



LOVE freedom as we will, we are sure 
to bind ourselves with some unwel- 
come tie. 

Tricotrin, 



THERE is more courage needed 
often-times, to accept the onward 
flow of existence, bitter as the waters of 
Marah, black and narrow as the channel 
of Jordan, than is needed to bow down 
the neck to the sweep of the death-an- 
gel's sword. 

Chandos, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 73 



" T LOVE you." The words were 

A uttered which, old as the hills 

eternal, have been on every human lip, 

and cursed more lives than they have ever 

blessed. 

Strathmore, 



A RETENTIVE memory is of great 
use to a man, no doubt ; but the 
talent of oblivion is, on the whole, more 

useful. 

A Village Commune, 



'' T LIKE her with my intelligence in- 
A fmitely," he said; ''with my heart, 
or what does duty for it, I abhor her." 

Moths. 



74 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDA: 



NOTHING loses by anticipation. 
Chandos, 



I 



WOULD be loved as I love — only so. 

Chandos, 



D 



ISTANCE is favorable to those 
loves of the soul. 

Moths. 



THERE are four orders of creatures 
that always know everything — they 
are journalists, ladies' maids, priests, and 
toy-terriers. 

Puck, 



T 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 75 

HE greatness of a great race is a 
thing far higher than mere pride. 

Wanda, 



IF you wait for a woman who has no 
artifices, I am afraid you will have to 
forswear the sex in toto, and come growl- 
ing back to your Diogenes tub in the 
Albany, with your lantern still lit every 
day of your lives. 

Lady Marabout' s Troubles, 



IS not the roughness or the sarcasm of 
a friend more welcome than the 
suave insincerity of foes ? 

Puck, 



76 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A. 



R 



EIGNING beauties are like reign- 
ing fashions — one must obey them. 

Strathmore, 



WHO can once have laughed in the 
light of the sun of Italy and not 
feel the world dark elsewhere ever after- 
wards ? It is only in Italy that the eyes 
of the people always, though they know it 
not, speak of God. 

Ariadne, 



WHEN a merciful Creator has ap- 
pointed our appetites for our 
consolation and support, it is only an 
ingrate who is not thankful lawfully to 
indulge them. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 77 

MEN lie to women out of mistaken 
tenderness or ill-judged compas- 
sion, or that curious fear of recrimination 
from which the highest courage is not 
exempt. A man deceives a woman with 
untruth, not because he is base, but he 
fears to hurt her with the truth. 

PascareL 



THERE is nothing so cruel in life as 
Faith. 

Folle-Farine. 



IS there aught that we love that does 
not stab us, soon or late ? There is 
no serpent without that can sting half so 
hard as the tenderness in us. 

Tricotrin, 



78 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THE sweet Spring came; and so 
sweet is it here, that it is joy- 
enough to live only to go out into the 
fields all ladened with blossom and feel 
your heart dance with the daffodils in the 
full sense of Wordsworth's words. 

A Village Commune, 



THE little stone of truth rolling 
through the many ages of the 
world has gathered and grown gray with 
the thick mosses of romance and super- 
stition. 

Ariadne, 



T 



HE joy of a strong nature is as 
cloudless as its suffering is desolate. 
In Maremma, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 79 

LIFE is governed by chance, and each 
of us, at best, is but a leaf that 
drifts on a hazardous wind ; now in the 
sunlight, now in the shadow, the wind 
blows the leaves hap-hazard together — for 
evil, for good, whichever it be. 

Strathmore, 



s 



HE had the fairest charm of youth, 

unconsciousness. 

Strathmore. 



WHEN we suffer very much our- 
selves, anything that smiles in the 
sun seems cruel — a child, a bird, a dragon- 
fly; nay, even a fluttering ribbon, or a 
spear-grass that waves in the wind. 



So FLASHES FROM ''QUID A." 

FORBIDDEN Intrusion in the press 
of the world, trodden down in the 
path of power, dashed aside by the mailed 
hand of a successful and unscrupulous am- 
bition, they colled about him, and would 

not be appeased. 

Strathmore, 



CUT your throat, blow out your brains, 
drown yourself — any one of these — 
that is a conceivable impulse ; but yawn ! 
What a confession of internal nothing- 
ness ! What a vapid and vacant wind-bag 
must be the man who collapses into a 
yawn ! 



Moths, 



A 



S little dogs always imitate big ones, 
so villages love to copy great cities. 
A Village Commune. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 8i 

IT Is easy to bear the contempt and 
censure of the world when we are 
happy, and defiance of its laws brings 
fame or rapture ; but its fears and its 
supercilious smiles may be hard even to a 
brave man to bear when the world has 
cause to call him a fool, when it can 
triumph in vaunting its own superior 
penetration, in recalling its own wise 
prophesies of his fall, and in compelling 
him to make the most difficult of all con- 
fession to a proud heart, *' I was wrong." 
Granville De Vigne, 



ON AT IONS! closely should you 
treasure your great men, for by 
them alone will the future know of you. 
A Dog of Flanders, 



82 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



THERE had been shadows all day^ 
and in the west there were masses 
of cloud, purple and blue-black, spreading 
away into a million of soft, scarlet cirri, 
that drifted before a low wind from the 
southward, tender and yet rich in tone as 
any scattered showers of carnation leaves. 
Through that vast pomp of dusky splen- 
dor and that radiance of rose, the sun itself 
still shone — shone full upon the city. 
Leaning on the broken edge of the watch- 
tower, and gazing down below, all Flor- 
ence seemed like the seer's dream of the 
new Jerusalem ; every stone of her seemed 
transmuted ; she was as though pavenand 
built of gold. Straightway across the 
whole valley stretched alchemy of that 
wondrous fire-glow, and all the broad, 
level lands of the Cosentino were trans- 
figured likewise into one vast sheet of 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 83 

gold on which the silver olives and the 
dim white villages and villas floated like 
frail white sails upon a summer sea. Far- 
ther, still farther yet, upon that burnished 
ocean, the mountains and the clouds met 
and mingled, golden likewise, broken here 
and there into some tenderest rose-leaf 
flush. Miraculously lovely as a poet's 
dreams of nameless things of God ! 

PascareL 



DIVINE? Well! *'A woman is a 
dish for the gods, if the devil 
dress her not," Shakspeare says ; but I 
think the devil generally has the dressing, 
and serves up sauce with it so very pi- 
quant that it is all but poisonous ; it's a dish 
like mushrooms — dainty but dangerous. 

Strathmore, 



84 FLASHES FROM *' OUlDAr 

ENVY Is a quick match, easily light- 
ed, and needs no spirit added to the 
wick to make it strike fire and flare into 

flame. 

Strathmore, 



G 



EN I US has its supremacy wher- 
ever it may dwell. 

A Village Commune. 



THERE is cold love where there is 
no jealousy. 

Strathmore, 



IT would be a wretched friendship that 
shirked the truth when its telling 
were needed. 

Strathmore. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUT DA." 85 



PEOPLE hate you if they think they 
bore you. It isn't that they care 
about you, but they fancy you find them 
stupid. 



Moths, 



SHE looked like a Greek poet's 
dream dressed by Worth." How 
could poor Worth dress a dream ? That 
would tax even his power. 

Moths, 



FOR a man may be negligent of all 
sympathy for himself, yet never, 
if he be poet or artist, will he be able 
utterly to teach himself indifference to all 

sympathy for his works. 

Folle-Farine, 



S6 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

IF one Is disposed to be sad, surely, 
of all sad things, an old spinet is 
the saddest ! To think of the hands that 
have touched it ; or of the children that 
have danced to it, of the tender old bal- 
lads that have been sung to the notes that 
to us seem so hoarse and so faulty ! All 
the musicians dead, dead so long ago, and 
the old spinet still answering when any 

one calls ! 

Wanda, 



T 



HE world is topsy-turvey, and the 
scum Is all atop. 

A Village Commtine, 



M 



U SIC Is an Impulse or It Is nothing. 
In a Winter City, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 87 



THE burden she had bound upon her 
shoulders none could lift off from 

them against her will. 

Ill Maremma, 



WE all sin, but some of us walk on, 
not looking back, and some of us 
do look back, and thus do go again over 
the ill-trodden path, and so, perchance, 
meet angels on the way — to mend it. 

Ariadne, 



THERE is no poor-rate and no work- 
house and nothing for the honest 
poor except a metre or so of ground in 
the cemeteries. 



A Village Com7nune, 



8S FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



A 



WOMAN guilty for the sake of gold 
would be guilty without gold, for 



the sheer love of guilt. 



Puck, 



c; 



OCIETY is a plant that must be fed 

>-^ and watered, and dug and matted 

scrupulously. If you do not take endless 

trouble with it, it will never blossom for 

you. 

Friendship, 



LOVE waits for no reason in its acts; 
it only knows that it hates those 
who rob it of the simplest word, and is 
jealous of the very brute that wins a touch 
or smile. ^ 

Strut /miore. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 89 

THE soul of the poet is like the mirror 
of the astrologer : it bears the re- 
flection of the Past and Future, and can 
show the secrets of men and gods, but, 
all the same, it is dimmed by the breath 
of those who stand by and gaze into it. 

Ariadne, 



HOW little women understand men^ 
and how poorly they love them, 
when they do not leave them alone. 

Wanda. 



DISCONTENT creeps into happy 
households, and under her hood 
says, **Let me in : I am Progress." 

Szgna. 



go FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



M 



USIC creates from a spirit-world 

of its own. 

Granville De Vigne, 



A 



GE is nothing else but death that 

is conscious. 

Under Two Flags, 



RINCES are never so happy as when 
they have a little bit of nature. 

Lady Marabout' s Troubles, 



IF pity be akin to love, believe me, 
passion is as often allied to hate. 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr gi 

WOMEN are like kaleidoscopes, and 
have a thousand phases, all pretty 
for the time, but never to be caught, and 
always changed when a new eye is on them. 

Strathmore. 



CAN Evil ever be outweighed? We 
may strive to atone, but we can 
never efface. The Past spreads like a 
river broken from its banks ; and all the 
coffer-dams we arise in our atonement 
cannot stay the rushing of the waters we 
have once let loose. Ah ! if, when Evil is 
begun, we know where it would end, men's 
hands would be kept pure from very 
dread of their own awful omnipotence for 

ruin. 

Chandos, 



92 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



T 



IIliRE was an accent in her words 
which told of a childhood perished 
in a nioht — of an innocence and a faith 
stabbed, stricken, and buried forevermore. 

Moths, 



H 



UMAN hearts are good in the 

main. 

A Villa PC Commune, 



TllKRE are people about whom the 
world will sometimes deign to read 
if George Sand or George Eliot write 
about them, but who, outside of a story- 
book, are absolutely uninteresting and in- 
significant. 

A J 711(1 or Commune. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 93 



BOYS' sorrows vent themselves in 
words, but men's griefs are voice- 
less ; for it comes only to destroy the fierce 
and far-rooted passion of vital suffering : 
you will find that it may sear, wither, wear 
out life and light, but it will never seek 
solace in confidence, never lament itself, 
but rather hug its tortures closer. You 
will find a difference between fictitious 
sorrow, which runs abroad proclaiming its 
own wrongs, and the grief which lies next 
the heart night and day : like the iron 
cross of the Romish priest, eats it slowly 
but none the less surely away. 

Granville De Vigne, 



L 



OVE, to be perfect, must be a relig- 
ion as well as a passion. 



94 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

A YOUNG girl's name Is like a 
peach — the down once brushed off, 
the fruit bears the trace of rough handHng 

forever. 

Tricotrin. 



LETTERS written in the morning 
-> never compromise you ; mots made 
in the morning never amuse you. 

Strathmore, 



Y 



OU keep your memory about you 
like a knotted cord of penitence. 
In Maremma, 



DEATH is the key-note of creation. 
Folle-Farine, 



FLASHES FROM ''QUI DA." 95 

LOVE art alone, forsaking all other 
loves, and she will make you happy 
with a happiness that shall defy the sea- 
sons and the sorrows of time, the pains of 
the vulgar and the changes of fortune, 
and be with you day and night, a light 
that Is never dim. But mingle with It any 
human love, and art will look forever at 
you with the eyes of Christ when he 
looked at the faithless follower as the cock 

crew. 

Ariadne, 



WHEN fame stands by us all alone, 
she Is an angel clad In light and 
strength, but when love touches her, she 
drops her sword and fades away, ghost- 
like and ashamed. 

Moths, 



96 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

PLEASURE alone cannot content 
any one whose character has any 
force or mind, any high intelHgence. 

I71 a Winter City, 



THE shadow of that unknown future 
which lay awaiting them, coiled in 
the folded leaves of yet unopened years. 

Strathmore, 



I DO N'T think it is for a young girl's 
happiness to begin womanhood, co- 
quetry, heart-burnings, and late hours, too 

soon. 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 97 

IN the human face, as in a picture, with 
time the shadows deepen and the 

lights grow fainter. ' 

Strathmore, 



YOUTH without pleasure is like a 
flower that comes up too early in the 

year, and is frozen half-blown. 

Ariadne, 



ALL women talk discursively ; in stu- 
pid ones it is an awful bore, but in 

clever ones it is charming. 

Puck, 



A PARTICULARLY happy man is 
not given at any time to retrospec- 
tion. 

Wanda, 



98 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

IT K shall tell mc where he comes 
JL from — I doubt that it is from luig- 
land ; see here — why not ? First, lie never 
says God-damn ; second, he doesn't eat 
his meat raw ; third, he speaks very soft ; 
fourth, he waltzes so light ; fifth he never 
grumbles in his throat, like any angry 
bear; sixth, there is no fog in him. 

Under Two Flags, 



WITHOUT coquetry or ambition it 
is impossible to enjoy society 
much. Every pretty woman slunild be a 
flirt, every clever woman a politician ; the 
aim, the animus, the intrigue, the rivalry, 
that accompany each of these pursuits, are 
the salt without which the great dinner 

were tasteless. 

. Motfis, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 99 

Till*', first violets were carried in mil- 
lions through the streets — the only 
innocent imperialists tlu! world has ever 

seen. 

A Provence Rose, 



OV all stranu^c! thini^s in hnman life, 
there is none stran^cM* than the 
dominance of Chance. 

Strathmore, 



THERE is a torture of the spirit that 
is more (h^vilish and more terrible 
to endure than the shorter, coarser torture 
of the body. 

Strathmore, 



loo FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THIS man, who had held himself his 
own God, to mold his destiny at will ; 
who had deemed he ruled his desires un- 
der iron curb, and who had looked on in 
cold disdain while others suffered or re- 
joiced, indifferent to joy as he was steeled 
to pain, endured tortures such as weaker, 
gentler natures never know — let them 
thank Heaven for their exemption. 

Sh^athmore, 



** T 1[ TE women are the best detectives 

V V in the world, only we can't hold 

our tongues ; we can't keep the secrets 

when we have learned them. We are so 

proud of our stolen nuts, that we crack 

them en plein jour, instead of keeping 

them to enjoy in the darkness of the 

night, as you wise men do." 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr loi 

FIDELITY alone can give to Love 
the grandeur and the promise of 

Eternity. 

Ariadne. 



A GREAT love does not of necessity 
Imply a great Intelligence, but it 
must spring out of a great nature. 

Ariadne, 



THE shame of one man is the shame 
of his race, and the evil that Is 

shielded Is shared. 

Idalia. 



THERE is no pleasure In doing what 
one pleases, unless there is some 

opposition to the doing. 

Moths. 



I02 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



IN these old noble places life should 
be " set to music " — Love, in its 
highest passion and its fairest form ; art 
as the gift of God to man ; day-dreams, in 
which the hours unfold, beautiful and un- 
counted like the leaves of the oleander 
flowers ; night, when " the plighted hands 
are softly locked in sweet unsevered sleep ;" 
gay laughter here and there, glad charity 
with all things ; meditation now and then 
to deepen the well-spring of the mind ; the 
open air always; limbs bathed in the 
warmth as in the summer sea ; the opal 
skies of the evening watched with fancies 
of the poets, and everywhere perpetual 
sense of a delicious rest, and of desire and 
of hope crowned to fruition ; — this was the 
life for Italy. 

Friendship. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 103 



THE desire to be great! when that 
insatiate passion enters a living soul, 
be it the soul of a woman-child dreaming 
of a coquette's conquests, or a crowned 
heir craving for a new world, it becomes 
blind to all else. Moral death falls on it ; 
and any sin looks sweet that takes it to 
its goal ; it is a passion that generates at 
once all the loftiest and all the vilest 
things which, between them, ennobles and 
corrupts the world ; even as heat generates 
at once the harvest and the maggot, the 
purpling vine and the lice that devour it. 
It is a passion without which the world 
would decay in darkness as it would do 
without heat ; yet to which, as to heat, all 
its filthiest corruption is due. 

Tricotrin, 



I04 FLASHES FROM ''OUlDAr 

IN youth we have hope ; later on we 
know that of all the gifts of Pandora's 
box none are so treacherous and delusive 
as the one that Pandora left at the bottom. 

Beatrice Boville. 



ANEW acquaintance is like a new 
novel ; you open it with expecta- 
tion, but what you find there seldom makes 
you care to take it off the shelf a second 

time. 

Friendship, 



EVEN the discreetest friends will, 
like the closest packed hold of a 
ship, leak occasionally. Salt water and 
secrets are alike apt to ooze. 

Friendship, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 105 

A WOMAN who thinks for herself is 
weak, but the woman who thinks' 
for another is strong. 

Friendship. 



MINDS like hers resemble running 
brooks ; they reflect what they 
pass through — they are still or sparkling, 
dark or radiant, according as they flow 
over sand or moss, under black clouds 
or sunny skies — the brook is always the 
same ; it is what it mirrors that varies. 

Friendship. 



CALUMNY can only lower us when 
it has power to make us what it 
calls us. 

Chandos, 



io6 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

IN a great love the eyes are blinded, 
the lips are closed, the ears are deaf, 
the will is paralyzed — only beholding, only 
breathing for, only hearing, only obeying 
one other life out of all the millions upon 
earth ; and nothing short of this is love. 

Friendship. 



THERE are things one is bound to 
forget, or, at least, that binds one to 
love as if they were wholly forgotten. 

PascareL 



COWS seem so stupid, chewing grass 
and whisking the flies away, but in 
their eyes there is the soul of lo. 

Signa, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA:' 107 



PEOPLE with fine brains and gener- 
ous souls will never learn that life, 
after all, is only a game ; a game which 
will go to the shrewdest player and the 
coolest. They never see this, not they ; 
they are caught on the edge of great pas- 
sions, and swept away by them. They 
cling to this affection like commanders 
to sinking ships, and go down with them. 
They put their whole heart into the hands 
of others who only laugh and wring out 
their life-blood ; they take all things too 
vitally earnest. Life is to them a wonder- 
ful, passionate, pathetic, terrible thing, 
that the gods of Love and of Death shape 
for them. They do not see that coolness 
and craft, and the tact to seize accident, 
and the wariness to obtain advantage, do, 
in reality, far more in hewing out a suc- 
cessful future than all the gods of Greek 



io8 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

or Gentile. They are very unwise. It is 

of no use to break their hearts for the 

world ; they will not change it. La culte 

de I'humanite is one, of all others, which 

will leave despair in its harvest. Laugh 

like Rabelais, smile like Montaigu ; that is 

the way to take the world. It only puts 

to death its Sebastians, and makes its 

Philips not sorrowful to see the boat is 

filling. 

Frie7idship, 



THE boat flew fast over the water. 
When boats leave you, and drag 
your heart with them, they always go like 
that ; and when they come, and your heart 
darts out to meet them, then they are so 

slow 1 

Puck, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 109 

SOONER or later — though they may 
lie to it long, half a life time, per- 
haps, I believe that men and women are all 
true to their physiognomies ; that they 
prove, sooner or later, that the index Na- 
ture has writ (though writ in crabbed, 
uncertain characters) upon their features 
is not a wrong or a careless one. Men 
lie, but Nature diO^'s> not. They dissemble, 
but she speaks out. They conceal, but she 
tells the truth. What is carried on the 
features will develop, sometime or other, 
in the nature. 

Strathmore, 



WHOSOEVER owns a secret, ever 
suspects that the world has un- 
earthed it. 



Straikmore, 



no FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THE red and green of the tufa land, 
the deep shadows of the pine woods, 
the pale aloe-dotted shores, the distant 
mountains, amethyst and purple as the 
mists cleared from them, flew by her rap- 
idly, a ball of seething, wind-blown, sunny 
water, flashing and heaving between her- 
self and them. 

hi Alar em ma. 



LOVE loses its loveliness made public ; 
it is like the grape, once handled — 
the bloom is gone. 

Friendship, 



w 



HAT is allegiance worth, unless it 
be voluntary? 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr m 

IT may be doubted if a man Is ever 
really happy with a woman with whom 

he cannot be candid. 

Friendship, 



IN Spain, when a lovely woman has had 
an adventure, her friends say she has 

eaten a lily. 

Friendship, 



OPPORTUNITY Is a little angel; 
some catch him as he goes, some 
let him pass by forever. 

Under Two Flags, 



T 



O be temperate is to be stupid. 

Moths, 



112 FLASHES FROM '' OUlDAr 

IF a man imagines an angel he must 
paint from the face that he loves 
best. 

Granville De Vzg?te, 



THAT sunny smile of Italy ! it has in 
it all the youth of the earth's golden 
ages — all the faith of man's first dreams 

of God. 

PascareL 



TO be a great artist one must be a 
student, and a sincere and humble 
one at the foot of every greatness — ay, and 
every weakness — which has preceded us. 

PascareL 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 113 

TO the art of the stage, as to every 
other art, there are two sides : the 
truth of it, which comes by inspiration — 
that is, by instincts subtler, deeper, and 
stronger than those of most minds — and 
the artifice of it, in which it must clothe 
Itself to get understood by the people. 

PascareL 



WHAT use is it to keep the person 
of a man beside you, if his soul 

be truant from you ? 

Wanda, 



A 



FURIOUS woman is more savage 
in her wrath than any beast of prey, 
Granville De Vign^, 
8 



114 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDA: 



D 



ID private pique ever fail to carry 
the day over public charity ? 

Lady Marabout' s Troubles, 



THINGS must be very rose-colored 
with us when we can smile sincerely 
on our enemies, and defeat their stings 
simply because we feel them not. 

Lady Marabouf s Troubles, 



MONEY is like a mill, no good stand- 
ing still. Let it turn, turn, turn, 
as fast as ever it can, and the more bread 
will come from it for the people to eat. 

Under Two Flags, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUTDAr 115 

THE cup of pleasure sometimes has 
dregs that one must drink long 
afterwards. 

Wanda, 



HERE is a gold-piece that carries 
Paradise in it ; or at least men 
think so ; but I am afraid, myself, that by 
the time we have found the gold-pieces, 
we have most of us forgotten the way to 
Paradise. 

Moths, 



THE love she had borne him stirred 
at times beneath the gravestones of 
scorn and wrath. 

^ Wanda, 



ii6 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

THAT ill weeds grow apace is a true 
old saw, never truer than of vindic- 
tive and envious passions. 

Wanda. 



SOME people go through life with 
their eyes shut, and then grumble 
there is nothing to see. 

Under Two Flags, 



AN explanation that had its root in 
honor, a reticence that sprang from 
conscience, was so welcome, and appeared 
so natural, that they consoled at once 
and healed the wounds of pride. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 117 

THERE are few things more spiteful 
that one can do to anybody than 
to take them at their word. 

Moths, 



IT Is not always definite motives that 
have the most influence ; the subtlest 
poisons are those which enter the system 
we know not how, and penetrate it ere 
we are aware. 

Wanda, 



INNOCENT unhappiness soon finds 
rest ; it is the sinful sorrow of later 
years that stares with eyes unclosed into 
the hateful emptiness.of night. 

Moths. 



ii8 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THE sunset hour, when the busy day 
still lingers on the earth, bowed 
down with the weight of sin and sorrow 
with which, in one brief twelve hours, 
the sons of men have ladened her, and 
the night falls down with noiseless wings 
from heaven, to lay her soft hands on 
weary human eyes and lead them into 
dreamland, to rest awhile from toil and 
care, is ever full of Nature's deepest 
poetry. 

Granville De Vigne. 



WHEN you can solace a mother for 
her first-born's death, then, and 
then only, shall you solace an artist for 
the death in him of his art. 

PascareL 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 119 

THEY were wise in their generation, 
and praised no woman before an- 
other. 

Moths, 



THE sunny daylight seemed to go 
round her in an amber mist. 

Moths, 



T 



O rifle a caravan is a crime, though 
to steal a continent is a glory. 

Under Two Flags, 



THERE is no solitude like that of a 
crowd. 

Beatrice Boville, 



120 FLAi^UElS l^KOM ''OUJDAr 

11 V. was a man in whom soiik^ v^(^in of 
A snpcrslilion liatl oullivc'd llic 
cold reason and cynical mockeries of the 
wordly <'X|)('ricnccs and opinions in which 

it was ■.i<(|»cd. 

Wanda^ 



CAN a man ever he certain of his 
|)hilos()i)hy ? Hiiilnshad served her 
failhfnlly all hi^; life, and hroke down in 

the very last honr. 

Tricotrin, 



ASl 1 1\ i'VWD woman can always make 
men forget she s[)rani; from the 
gutter. 



Granville He Vigne, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 121 

ITALIAN children have the whole In- 
ferno and Paradise in their wonder- 
ful eyes : why is it ? They have no soul 
in them ; or at least they will sell any they 
have for a copper centime, to buy salt fish 
or a tomato. But the look is there, and 
it is not here. Is it because we have so 
much tragedy in our blood, in our soil ? 
or is it because the Italian mothers still 
croon strophes over the sleeping babies ? 

Frescoes, 



T^ORGIVENESS is abstinence from 



vengeance. 

Wanda, 



s 



HREWD intuition bears one into the 

region of Truth. 

Wanda, 



122 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

IN the steeple-chase of life there is no 
time to look back at the failures who 
have broken down over a "double and 
drops," and fallen out of the pace. 

Under Two Flags. 



A FRAGMENT of the Pantheon Is 
worth a whole spotless and un- 
broken modern building. 

Granville Dc Vigne. 



THE most truthful men will make the 
most consummate actors when 
spurred up to it. 

Lady Marabout's Troubles, 



H 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 123 



OUSES take their atmosphere from 

those who Hve in them. 

Moths. 



VIU^Y flower, even the fairest, has 

its shadow beneath it, as it swings 

in the sunhght. 

Strathmore, 



POOR old widowed Pisa! she always 
seems to be lamenting, Dido-like, 
her last lover, the sea. She is inutterably 
sad ; and yet, I am never abroad on a 
moonlit night without wanting to watch 
it shine on her wonderful jjalaccs, on her 
empty desolate squares, on her perfection 
of desolation. 

PascareL 



124 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



ROSES have been the flowers of si- 
lence ever since the world began. 
A Proveiice Rose, 



F 



OR honor makes a lie our social 
life's chief necessity. 

Moths. 



THE great, golden, silent waste was 
all alive with glorious-colored 
insects, and waving various-hued grasses, 
shrill grasshoppers trilling under leaves, 
wise-faced bearded goats straying under 
broken arches and gazing down from vine- 
wreathed ruins, but yet withal so still — 
so strange — so death-like. 

Puck, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 125 

A WISE man never lies ; I don't mean 
because he Is moral, but because he 
is judicious ; somebody always finds out 
a falsehood ; and once found out, your 
credit is gone. 

Strathmore, 



THE man who turns his back on the 
world has generally seen the world's 
back ere he does so. 

Tricotrin. 



TO insult an inferior is ungenerous, it 
is derogatory ; whom you offend 1 
you raise for the hour to a level with your- 
self. Remember to choose your foes not 
less carefully than you choose your friends. 

Wanda, 



126 FLASHES FROM '' OUJDAr 

A WOMAN'S reputation— a thing so 
linrhtly thrown away with an idler's 

word. 

Under Two Flags, 



TRUTH, innocence and serenity is a 
triad without which no woman is 
truly beautiful, and without which no 
man's love for her can be pure. 

Molhs, 



A TURKISH lily, when all its pomp 
of color and of blossom has been 
shaken down in the wind antl withered, 
is not more rapidly forgotten than the 
royalty of a fashionable fame when once 

reverse has overtaken it. 

Chandos, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 127 

VENGEANCE is a good Madeira- 
it grows mellower by keeping. There 
is nothing on earth so sweet, except its 
twin, success. 

Ckandos, 



GENIUS is nobility, and like nobility 
is obligation. 



Ariadne, 



VERONA is not like my Florence; 
indeed, it is not given to every 
city to be born out of fields of lilies, and 
keep their sweetness with her forever, as 
Florence does ; a wood-land fragrance 
always amidst the marble and the gold. 

PascareL 



128 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



IN morals as in metals, you cannot work 
gold without supporting it by alloy. 

Wanda. 



T NTENSELY selfish people are always 



very decided as to what they wish. 

Wanda, 



I 



T is the trifles of life that are its hours. 
Under Two Flags. 



COSTLY wedding-presents are very 
like Judas's kisses. 

Granville De Vzgne. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUTDAr 129 

THE wild-rose fragrance breathes of 
the hill-side and the wood-lands, and 
brings back to us soft touches of memory- 
of youth, of a fairer life, and a purer air 
than that in which we are living now. 

Lady Marabout's Troubles. 



SOMETIMES I think Love is the 
darkest mystery of life : mere desire 
will not explain it ; nor will the passions of 
affection. You pass years amidst the 
crowds, and know naught of it ; then all 
at once you meet a stranger's eyes, and 
never again are you free. That is love. 
Who shall say whence it comes ? It is a 
bolt from the gods, that descended from 
Heaven, and strikes us down into Hell. 

Pipistrello, 



130 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA: 



E 



OVE was the law of her life, the 
gift, the glory of her nature. 

In Maremma, 



THE hours went away; the golden 
day died ; the grayness of evening 
stole the glow from the gladioli, and shut 
up the buds of the uses ; the great lilies 
gleamed but the whiter in the dimness of 
twilight ; the vesper chimes were rung 
from the cathedral two leagues away, over 

the fields. 

Folle-Farine, 



TH E dead do not hurt us," said Musa, 
with a grave tenderness. '* They 
have but gone before where soon we go." 

In Maremma. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 131 



THE sun sank entirely, leaving only a 
trail of flame across the heavens ; 
the waters grew gray and purple in the 
shadows ; one boat, black against the crim- 
son reflections of the West, swept on 
swiftly with the inrushing tide ; the wind 
rose and blew long curls of sea-weed on 
the rocks ; the shores of the bay were 
dimmed in a mist through which the 
lights of the little hamlets dimly glowed ; 
and the distant voices of fishermen calling 
to each other as they drew in their deep- 
sea nets came faint and weird-like. 

Folle-Farine, 



FOR whatever suffers very much has 
always so much strength to con- 
tinue to exist. 

Lampblack, 



132 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A. 



A 



GREAT genius can never altogether 
rest without creation. 

Moths, 



w 



OMEN, like flies, know all that 
goes on behind them. 

Strathmore, 



AN old proverb has settled long ago 
that pride feels no pain ; and per- 
haps the more foolish the pride, the less 
is the pain that is felt. 

The Ambitious Rose-Trcp, 



T T needs a pure soul to love the dead. 



In Maremma, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 133 

WHEN we tell the poor that when 
they have worked and starved long 
enough, they will perish like bits of 
candle that have burnt themselves out ; 
that they are mere machines, made of 
carbon and hydrogen, which, when they 
have had due friction, will then crumble 
back into dust ; and call this the spread of 
education, will they be patient ? 

A Village Commune, 



T 



HERE is no sin that shuts out 
Hope. 

Tricotin, 



N 



OTHING stings so sharply and is 
so hard to forgive as injustice. 

Beatrice Boville, 



134 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

I READ, the other day, somewhere, 
that Madame Recamier, who was al- 
ways called the greatest beauty of our 
great-grandmothers' times, was really 
nothing at all to look at — quite ordinary ; 
but she did smile so in everybody's face, 
and listen so to all the bores, that the 
world pronounced her a second Helen. 

Moths. 



WHEN we are very young, all our 
sorrow is despair ; but it does not 
kill us, and we like to be consoled. 

Moths, 



ACCIDENT Is chiefly dreaded by 
women; by men rarely. 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 135 

I SAY I do honor to those who can be 
coquettes and are not ; but I despise 
all who would be so, and, in despair of 
arriving at it themselves, hate and vilify 
all those who can. 

Cecil Castlemaine s Gage. 



SHE knew that the sympathy of so- 
ciety is chiefly curiosity, and that 
when it has any title to pity it is quite 

sure to sneer. 

Moths. 



THE beauty of woman is the passion- 
flower of our lives. 

Trlcotrin. 



136 FLASHES FROM '' OUlDAr 

AFTER the glare and asphalt of 
Paris, these deep shadows, these 
cool, fresh greens, these cloud-bathed 
mountains, seem to have the very calm of 
eternity in them. They seem to say to 
me in reproach, "Why will you wonder?" 
" What can you find nobler and gladder 

than we are T 

Wanda, 



T 



HE bitterest words spoken by hu- 
man lips are, "We must part !" 

Granville de Vigne, 



" ^^HE did not like women much, and 

^^ there is nothing that looks so un- 

amiable." » 

Mol/is. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 137 



AMBITIOUS men are all alike. 
Strathmore, 



AN indiscreet woman is never frank, 
for she has the memory of silly 
things said and done which require con- 
cealment. 

Beatrice Boville, 



THE faith of men can only live by the 
purity of women. 

Moths. 



POPPIES are the flowers of death. 
Ariadne, 



138 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA: 

LEAVE formularies aside, and open 
your eyes, good world ! women, 
from Eve downwards, have been first 
tempters, and the tempters make up half 
the ranks of their sex. 

Strathmore. 



WHEN money is due to a man, it 
changes the honey of the human 
heart to gall. 

A Village Commune, 



I DO not think there is much destiny in 
this life beyond that which men's 
hands fashion for themselves. 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 139 

WE are straws on the wind of the 
hour, too frail and too brittle to 
float into the future. Our little day of 
greatness is a mere child's puff-ball, in- 
flated by men's laughter, floated by 
women's tears ; what breeze so changeful 
as the one, what water so shallow as 
the other ? The bladder dances a little 
while ; then sinks : and who remembers ? 

PascareL 



HE sang the '* Salve DInora " of that 
living master who, whatever his 
weakness or his fault, has in his music 
that echo of human passion and of mor- 
tal pain which more faultless composers, 
with their purer science, have missed. 

Moths, 



I40 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

A MAN may rise with an admirable per- 
severance and dauntlessness ; but 
the hatchets with which he carves his way 
up the steep, shelving ice-slope may, nev- 
ertheless, be blood-stained steel and stolen 
goods. We are too apt, in our wonder 
and our applause at the height to which he 
has attained against all odds, to forget to 
note whether his steps up the incline have 
been clean, and justly taken. When the 
white block of marble shines so solid and 
so costly, who remembers that it was once 
made up of decaying shells and rotting 
bones, and millions of dying insects' lives, 
pressed to ashes ere the rare stone was ? 

Chandos, 



s 



USPICION degrades two people. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 141 



THESE are the fountain-springs of 
all the world's happiness : heedless- 
ness, possession, love. 

Ariadne, 



WHAT fools men look to themselves 
when they see themselves in the 
mirror of their old dead loves. 

PascareL 



TO a very proud woman, in whom the 
senses have never asserted their 
empire, there is inevitably an emotion of 
almost shame, of self-surrender, of loss of 
self-respect, in the first impulses of love. 

Wanda, 



142 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



A STATESMAN dying, asks, "Is the 
treaty signed ? " A woman dying, 
asks, '* Am I bien coiffee?" 

Strathrnore, 



BE able to dine en prince at home, and 
you will be invited out every night 
of your life — be hungry au troisieme, and 
you must not lick the crumbs from under 
your sworn allies' table. 

Granville De Vigne, 



HE was a man in whose life incidents 
followed each other too rapidly 
for remembrance to have any abiding- 
place or regret any home in his mind. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 143 

HE has killed her conscience ; there is 
no murder more awful. It is to slay 
what touch of God we have in us. 

Tricotrin, 



s 



^ ^ THERE truth is not, how shall there 



be peace ? 

Tricotrin, 



I 



LOVE all beautiful things, and pity 

all lonely ones. 

In Maremma. 



THE first step to wisdom, the sages 
say, is to feel that you know noth- 
ing. 

Granville De Vigne. 



144 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

HEARTS don^t break. I don't know 
whether they used to be Sevres, to 
make the poet's experience correct ; but 
they are all stone-china now, and won't 

even crack. 

Randolph Gordon, 



YOU are right " — '* I was wrong " — 
The noblest words that can be ut- 
tered by human lips. 

Tricotrin, 



WHAT, has vulgar love of eating in 
common with the exquisite delica- 
cies of gastronomical discrimination ? The 
palate requires education from birth up- 
wards. 

Puck, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 145 

IS there anything so humanizing as a 
perfect dinner ? When a man eats 
exquisitely, he feels harmoniously and 
thinks placidly. 

Puck, 



THE gold of the necklace hung five 
fathoms down, upon a branch of 
coral, among the gliding, incurious fish 
and the strange foliage of the deep-water 

weeds. 

In Maremma, 



WHEN grief has sat long by one's ^ 
hearth, it is impossible to warm 
the ashes of joy again — they are cold and 
dead forever. 

Pipistrello, 
10 



146 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA: 



O 



ATHS are necessary for people who 
don't know their own minds. 

Wanda, 



THE instinct of enmity is quicker than 
that of friendship, or of love, the 
world through. 

Strathmore, 



WHEN all the habits of life are sud- 
denly rent asunder, they are like 
a rope cut in two. They may be knotted 
together clumsily, or may be thrown al- 
together aside, and a new strand woven, 
but they will never be the same again. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 147 



OTHER men dreaded the sea, and 
cursed it ; but he, in his way, loved it 
ahiiost with passion ; and could he have 
chosen the manner of his death, would 
have desired that it should be by the sea, 
and through the sea ; a death cold, serene, 
and dreamily voluptuous ; a death on 
which no woman should look and in which 
no man should have share. 

F olle-F arine. 



B 



IG brains do not easily hold trifles. 

Moths, 



M 



EN can avenge themselves: wo- 
men can only die. 

Chandos. 



148 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



TH E past, however bright when It v/as 
"present," Is ever dark with vain de 
sire when it lies behind us. 

Tricotrin, 



IF the Venus de Medici could be ani- 
mated into life, women would only 
remark that her waist was large. 

Wanda, 



"• T3 LIND T The word always strikes a 
-LI chill to those who hear It ; It Is not 
a very rare calamity, but It Is one, of all 
others which most touches by-standers and 
is most quickly realized. 

Moths. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 149 



THE instrument on which we his- 
torians phiy is that thing, the hu 
man heart. It looks a Httle matter to 
strike chords of laughter or of sorrow; 
but, indeed, to do that aright, and rouse a 
melody which shall leave all who hear it 
the better and the braver for the hearing, 
this may well take a man's lifetime, and, 
perhaps, may well repay it. 

Pascarel, 



YOUTH is genius : it makes every 
dawn a new world, every breath a 
delight. We weave philosophies as life 
slips from us ; but when we were young 
our mere life was a poem. 

Chandos, 



(SO FLASFIES FROM '' OUIDAr 



Lirr the world abandon you, but to 
yourself be true. 

Chandos. 



R 



OMANCE has been the germ and 
nurse of all great writers. 

Grafivi/ie de Vigne, 



UNTIL the vine-leaves of youth are 
faded, who knows their value or 

sweetness ? 

Tricot r in. 



T T is always good to be loyal, and ready 



to endure to the end. 



VVMr^ibcrg Store. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 151 

THE noonday sun fell golden all 
around ; tlic deep, sweet peace of 
the; silenl coiinlry rei^^ned everywhere ; the 
pigeons (led to and fro in and out of their 
little arched homes ; llu; mill-stream flowed 
on, singing a pleasant son^;^ ; now and 
then a \'\\)r. ai)ricot dropped with a low 
sound on th(! turf; closi; about was all the 
radiance of summer llowers ; of lu^avy rich 
roses, of yellow lime; tufts, of sheaves of 
old-fashioned, comely phlox, and all the 
delicate shafts of the i^raceful lilies. 

Folle-Farine. 



WHKN we woo death, he comes not ; 
hut when w(; bar the chandler 
door, then he enters with his chill breath 

and stealthy step. 

Granville De Vzjrne, 



152 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDA: 



M 



EN don't change their natures, only 
their faces. 

Strathmore, 



THE village lay along a river green 
as the Adige; with low mountains 
in sight across a green table-land of vine 
and chestnut, olive and earn ; with tall 
poplars by the water, and a church with a 
red-brick bell-tower, and the bell swinging 
behind its wooden cage. 

A Village Commune, 



JUSTICE is blind — I never under- 
stand very well, how, being so, she 

can see her own scales. 

Wanda. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 153 



THE coldest will feel on occasion, and 
all have some tender place that can 
wince at the touch. 

Lady Marabout's Troubles, 



A WOMAN'S violence is a mighty 
power; before it reason recoils un- 
nerved, justice quails appalled, and peace 
perishes like a burnt-up scroll ; it is a sand- 
storm, before which courage can do but 
little ; the bravest man can but fall on his 
face and let it rage on about him. 

Friendship, 



NOTHI 
as is 



OTHING in all the world is so cold 
contempt. 

Ariadne, 



154 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

IF unfortunate, go talk with the ladies ; 
they always gild the bitter pill of 
adversity. 

Chandos, 



THERE is only one lamp which we 
can carry in our hand, and which 
will burn through the darkest night, and 
make the light of a home for us in a 
desert place : it is sympathy with every 
thing that breathes. 

Ariadne. 



TO be called clever is the last resource 
of mediocrity when it can find 
nothing more to cast against excellence. 

Chandos, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 155 

LOVE is no more eternal than the 
roses ; but, like the roses, it renews 
with every summer sun in as fair a fra- 
grance as it bloomed before. Women only 
rebel against this truth because their sea- 
son of the roses — their youth — is so short. 

Chandos, 



T 



O think evil unjustly is to create evil. 

Chandos, 



WE realize the temptation of others ; 
we feel how little right we, with 
so much sin among us, have to dare to 
judge another. If human nature lasted, 
what it is in its best moments poets would 
have no need to fable of an Eden. 

Granville De Vigne, 



iS6 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

ATJCMrJ^RAMKN'r ihat is never 
earnest is at times well-nigh as 
wearisome as a tc^nperament that is never 
gay; there comes a time wlien, if you can 
never toucli to any cle])th, the ceaseless 
froth and ])rightness of tlie surface will 
create a certain sense of impatience, a cer- 
tain sense of want. 

Ckandos, 



1^ l^Vn^:Win>^S puff bad books as 
V ladies praises plain women. 

C/iandos. 



D 



O what wise men never do ; see 
yourself as you are. 

CJiaiidos, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA." 157 



PIETY and reverence of age are twin 
blossoms on one stem of a tree that 
grows at the right hand of God in Para- 
dise. 

Folle-Farine, 



THERE is a charm and a charm. 
There is that of the accessible, and 
of the inaccessible ; of the rosebud, and of 

the edelweiss. 

Moths, 



A STOVE can no more speak without 
the fire than a man can see without 
light. Give it fire, and it will sing to you, 
tell tales to you, offer you in return all 
the sympathy you ask. 

The Nur enter g Store, 



153 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA: 



SHE was a child with the beauty of a 
woman ; there could be no greater 

praise for her. 

Chandos, 



HE fights well — it is often a black- 
guard's virtue." 

Under Tzvo Flags, 



A WOMAN has intuition, but no 
power of argument. 

Chandos, 



GATHER a lily in its whiteness and 
steep it in the sunset, and you will 
see something like her. 

In Maremma, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUTDAr 159 

TO touch art without a right to touch 
It, merely as a means to find bread ! 
No ! unless art be adored for Its own sake, 
and purely. It must be left alone. Philip 
of Macedon had every free man's child 
taught art ; I would have every boy and 
girl taught Its sacredness : so, we might In 
time get back some accuracy of taste In 
the public, some conscientiousness of pro- 
duction In the artist. If artistic creation 
be not a joy, an imperious necessity, an 
instinct of all the forces of the mind, let 
the boy go and plov^^, and the girl go and 
spin. 

Ariadne, 



SIN ever comes obedient to man's bid- 
ding ; expiation, fugitive and fleet- 
ing, mocking him, eludes his grasp. 

Strathmore, 



i6o FLASnJiS FROM '' OUIDAr 

T\\\\ dawn was red and very cold, the 
i^cranimn luic of the sky glowino^ 
throui^h the whiteness of the mist as it 
had done the previous day : nothlno- is 
more beautiful than these winter dawns, 
so rosy, so luminous, yet so vaporous, 
with llu' morniuo- star shinino- clear and 
lustrous in the \w\ o{ the easterly heavens, 
and the clouds drifting* like smoke alonof 
the faces of the hills. 

/;/ iMarc))ima. 



^^111^Y say there is no love more 
tendcT than the love of an artist 
for liis work, wlniher he is author, paintt^r 
o\' musicia!\ ; lor iht^ Iruit ol his talent he 
hears a love that none save those who feel 
it can attempt to understand. 

Granville De Vigiie, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr i6i 



Ml'LN \\\w like snow-bcills ; to bc^in 
with, it is .1 j)i(,'C(! of snow, soft 
pun! and niallcahlc!, and easily enough 
melted; but the snow-ball ox^ls kicked 
about and mixed u|) with other snow, and 
knocked ai^ainst stones and an^h^s, aiul 
hurried, shoved, and pushed alon^s until 
in sheer self-defense, it hardens itself into 
a solid, impenetrable, immovable block of 

ice. 

Granville De Vlgne, 



WOMAN'S wit" can do anything 
if given free run and free scope; 
and with that indescribable yc!t priceless 
quality of her sex she was richly endowed. 

Strathmore, 



i62 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

GENIUS should be wide as the 
heaven and deep as the sea in In- 
finite comprehension. To understand 
intuitively — that Is the breath of life. 
Whose understanding was ever as bound- 
less as Shakespeare's ? From the woes of 
the mind diseased to the coy joys of the 
yielding virgin, from the ambition of the 
king and the conqueror, to the clumsy 
glee of the clown and the milkmaid, from 
the highest heights of human life to the 
lowest follies of It, he comprehended all. 
That is the wonder of Shakespeare. No 
other writer was ever so miraculously 
impersonal. And if one thinks of his 
manner of life, it is the more utterly sur- 
prising. With everything in his birth and 
his career, and his temper, to make him 
a cynic and revolutionist, he has never a 
taint of either pessimism or revolt. 

Ariadne, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 163 

EXPERIENCE Is an excellent spy- 
glass, but it has this drawback, that 
Prejudice very often clouds the lens. 

Puck, 



H 



E could not keep a gift he had no 
power to return in kind. 

In Maremma, 



A MAN can be a passable actor if 
Nature has given him the trick of 
it ; but he will not be a great one unless 
he studies the literature of his own and 
other nations ; unless he knows something 
of the intricacies of color and of melody ; 
above all, unless he can probe and analyze 
human nature, alike in its health and its 

disease. 

PascareL 



i64 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

*'T)ERFECT love casts out fear," 
A runs the tradition ; rather, surely, 
does the perfect love of a woman break 
the courage which no other thing could 
even daunt, and set foot on the neck 
which no other yoke could even touch. 

Folle-Farine, 



H 



E Is the best of all actors — one who 

believes in himself. 

Wanda, 



AS a maiden, she would have been 
^ called lovely, but too cold, and 
passed over. Married, she had that posi- 
tion which adorns as diamonds adorn, and 
that charm of forbidden fruit which piques 

the sated palate of mankind. 

Moths, 



V 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 165 

ANITY Is the sole passion that 

knows no satiety. 

Tricotrin, 



AH! that Is all the poor ever do know 
of what there is on earth — that there 
is pain and cold and death. 

Puck, 



HE had the hand of a painter, but he 
had the heart of a mountaineer. 
What he loved best was the rush of ice- 
fed waters, the stillness of the great gla- 
ciers, the rarefied air of the peaks and 
domes that towered above the earth- 
hiding clouds. 

In Maremma, 
U 



i66 FLASHES FROM *' OUJDA: 



RETICENCE is a fine quality: it is 
the marble of human nature. But 
sometimes it provokes the impatience 
that the marble awoke in Pygmalion. 

Wanda, 



ASSOCIATION, you know, is like 
the burr off the hedges ; it clings 
ere you know it, and we can scarcely free 
ourselves of it without losing something 
— be it only a shred. 

PascareL 



A DRUM is no pleasure to a boy 
after he has broken it and found 
the music is empty wind, with no mystery 
about it whatever. 

Granville de Vigne, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 167 



HONESTY does not prosper, and 
truth is at a miserable discount ; 
straightforward frankness makes a myriad 
of foes, and adroit diplomacy as many foes. 
If you make a prettily-turned compliment, 
who cares if it is sincere ? If you hold 
your tongue where you cannot praise, be- 
cause you will not tell a conventional 
falseh-ood, the world thinks you very ill- 
natured, or odiously satirical. Society is 
entirely built upon insincerity and con- 
ventionalities, from the wording of an ac- 
ceptance of a dinner invitation, where we 
write, ''with much pleasure," thinking to 
ourselves, " What a bore !" to the giant 
hypocrisies daily spoken without a blush 
from pulpit and lecture, and legitimatized 
both as permissible and praiseworthy. To 
truth and unconventionalities society, of 
course, is averse ; and whoever dares to 



i68 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

uphold them must expect to be hissed as 
Paul by the Ephesians because he shiv- 
ered the silver shrines and destroyed the 
craft by which they got their wealth. 

Beatrice Boville, 



BE the reason what it may; lie as it 
will in climate, race or breeding; it is 
a fact that the Italian physiognomy re- 
tains, as no other nation does, the im- 
pression of the Past upon it. 

PascareL 



THE boy had something girlish in him, 
as men of genius have ever some- 
thing of the woman. 

Signa, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 169 



G 



O 



EN I US is fanaticism. 



Stgna. 



NE can never argue with a passion 
that is unhappy. 

Wanda, 



HERALDRY may He, but voices do 
not. Low people make money, 
drive in haste, throng to palaces, receive 
kings at their tables, by force of gold ; but 
their antecedents always croak out in their 
voices. They either screech or purr. 
They have no clear undulation ; besides, 
their women always tumble over their 
trains, and theirmen bow worse than their 
servants. 

Tricotrin, 



lyo FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

COMMONLY it is the woman on 
whom the remembranc of love has 
an enthralHng power when love itself is 
traitor ; commonly it is the man on whom 
the past has little influence, and to whom 

its appeal is vainly made. 

Wanda, 



T 



O be liked nowadays you must make 

yourself cheap. 

Moths, 



THERE is something oddly touching, 
pathetic, and majestic, almost sacred, 
in the sight of the surging sea of human 
life. Taken individually, the units of each 
are unimpressive, grotesque, and common- 
place. 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUlDAr 171 

NEW acquaintances are much pleas- 
anter than familiar ones ; the 
varnish Is fresh and the gilding is bright, 
and the polish is smooth, and you only 
touch the surface with friends an hour old. 

Strathmore, 



WHOM one trusts with one's self, 
one may well trust with every 
thing else. 

Wanda. 



WHEN life is still a coin unspent, 
it looks the purest gold, and bears 
on it, under a bough of laurel, the figures 
of victory and of love. 

Signa, 



172 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



ON the long, low, sandy lines of the 
coast, and on the blue waters, the 
moonlight was still shining. In the East, 
the great arc of the sky, the distant moun- 
tains, and the plains with their scattered 
cities, were all rose-colored with the flush 
of the rising day. Night and morning met, 
kissed and parted. In some vague way 
the strange beauty of it moved the be- 
holder. The vast breadth of water, that 
was so new to him, sparkling under the 
moon, with white sails motionless here 
and there, and islands like clouds, and in 
face of it the sunrise, awed him with its 
wonder, as the familiar loveliness of his 
own hills and valleys had no power to do. 

Signa, 



I 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 173 

T is not fear of death, it is not desire 
oflife. 

Signa, 



LANDSCAPE painting is the only 
original form of painting that 
modern times can boast. 

Ariadne, 



HAD study and wise companionship 
been given to her, she might have 
found utterance for all the thoughts and the 
fancies, the dreams and the affections, that 
thronged on her amidst the woods and on 
the sea, but left her dumb and moved to a 
mute joy, keen almost to pain. 

In Maremma, 



174 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A." 

BETTER to know the secrets of 
the gods, even though with pain, 
than to lead the dull, brute life, though 
painless. It is only in our dark hours 
that we sell our souls to a dreamless 
ease. 

Idalza, 



FLORENCE never can be very sad. 
Her tears and smiles lie close to- 
gether. If she draws the saintly cowl 
above her, her fair eyes laugh from be- 
neath the. folds, so that one half shall 
swear the robe of penance is a masker's 
domino. She tells her beads with one 
hand, but she touches her lute with the 
other. 

PastareL 



K 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 175 

IMDER than treachery is the knife 
that severs the chord of life. 

hi Maremma, 



" '^ I "HERE is no merit in virtue when 
J- sin would disgust one. I suppose 
the world is right to be capricious in its 
award. Since it is only a matter of tem- 
perament, it is nothing very great to be 
guiltless. If one likes one's soul clean 
like one's hands, it is only a question of 
personal taste. There is no right and no 

wrong — so they say." 

Moths. 



w 



OMEN'S eyes are the pleasantest 

mirrors there are. 

Strathmore, 



176 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



WOMEN always can, when they 
choose, find out anything. 

Moths. 



NEITHER benefit nor wrong would 
have ever been written in sand with 
her. 

I71 Maremma, 



CONSCIENCE is God! and hide us 
where we will, it tracks us out ; and 
we must look whither it bids ; we must lis- 
ten to that which it utters ; we must be- 
hold that which it brings ; from its pursuit 
there is no escape, from its tribunal there 
is no appeal. 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 177 

THE world is like wine — there are 
heads it does not affect ; there are 

palates that do not like it. 

Wanda, 



THE desires and the delights of love 
die swiftly, but the knowledge of 
honor abides always. 

Under Two Flags, 



I OFTEN think that the doctrine of 
immortality has no better plea than 
the vague yearning for something unseen 
and unconceived, the unuttered desire 
which rises in us at the sound of true 

music. 

Granville De Vigne, 



178 FLASHES FROM " OUIDA: 



M 



EN do not like their religion spoken 

lightly of. 

Wanda, 



A MAN'S later loves are sure to be 
utterly different, and a distinct style, 
from his earlier. In his youth he only 
asks for what charms his eyes and senses ; 
in manhood — if he be a man of taste or 
intellect at all — he will go further, and re- 
quire interest for his .mind and response 
for his heart. 

Granville De Vigne, 



THE sea is fellow-reaper with death. 
Strathmore, 



c 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 179 



RIME lies In intent. 

Strathmore, 



REMORSE is holy to God, sacred in 
men. 

Strathmore, 



IS crime ever buried ? It sleeps, but is 
never dead. 

Strathmore, 



LOVE and marriage are two totally- 
different things; they ought never 
to be named together ; they are cat and 
dog ; one kills the other. 

Moths, 



i8o FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA: 



HER high hopes were all dead, like 
last year's leaves. 

Lampblack, 



'^ I "HE proof of love is to endure in 

Stratlmiore, 



J- pain 



IF the jealousy of a lover be poetic, the 
jealousy of a wife is only ridiculous. 

Wa7ida, 



WHEN will the truth be written of 
hospitals anywhere? If ever it 
were written, the faculty would swear it all 

a lie. 

A Village Commune, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr i8i 



W 



HEN a thing becomes personal, 
philosophy becomes difficult. 
Lady Marabout' s Troubles, 



WHEN people laugh in our own 
house, we must let them do it, 
even if it be at ourselves. 

Wanda, 



NATURE is a shocking socialist; 
that is why she is shut out from 
forum, school, and pulpit. She is a white- 
robed Hypatia, whom the saints stoned 
lest her teachings should unseat them — 
and there is no renown like the Cyrils of 
the creeds. 

Tricotrin, 



1 82 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A. 



YOU should never have a woman to 
dinner; they shouldn't come until 
the olives. You cannot appreciate the 
delicate flavor if you are obliged to turn a 
compliment while you are eating it ; you 
never can tell whether a thing is done to 
a second if, as you discuss it, you are 
pondering on the handsome flesh-tints of 
a living picture beside you. The presence 
of a woman disturbs that cool, critical 
acumen that serene, diving beatitude 
that should attend your dinner. 

Chandos, 



PHYSICAL beauty, even when it is a 
little soulless, is an admirable weap- 
on for instantaneous slaughter. 

Lady Maraboufs Troubles, 



F 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 183 

IDELITY is no fidelity unless it has 
opportunity to swerve if it choose. 
Granville De Vigne. 



I 



NSTINCT is seldom at fault when 
we are conscious of an enemy. 

Wanda, 



THERE are many losses that are bit- 
ter enough, but there is not one so 
bitter as the loss of the right to resent. 

Under Two Flags, 



w 



OMEN are the mischief that casts 
us adrift to chance. 

Under Two Flags, 



i84 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A.'* 

NEVER say " No " rashly, nor '^ Yes" 
either ; but when you have said 
them, stand to them as a soldier to his 

guns. 

Moths, 



A WOMAN who has good conversa- 
tion is as rare as one who does not 
care for scandal. 

Gra7iville De Vigne, 



THE Cross before which the fiend 
shrinks cowering in " Faust " is but 
a symbol of the power of a noble life to 
force even hatred to its knees. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDA." 185 

CALUMNY is the parasite of char- 
acter ; the stronger the character 
the closer to it cHngs the strangler. 

Wanda, 



TO the mind of a child gigantic and 
utterable terrors rise up under the 
visitation of a vague alarm. 

Wanda, 



w 



E do our original maker credit ; 



nothinof crood in this world is 
without a dash of diablerie. Samples are 
the wet blankets, proprieties are the blank 
walls, principles are the quickset hedges 
of life ; but devilry is its champagne. 

Under Two Flags, 



i86 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

IF a man breaks his leg, he thinks it a 
sad accident, a great affliction ; if he 
sees his friend break his, he has no hesi- 
tation in pronouncing It a judgment. 

Granville De Vigne. 



T 



O those who are courageous, all 
things are possible. 

Under Two Flags, 



THE ocean, In her spiritual, poetic 
creed, was, as the mighty servant of 
God, moved by his voice, and ruled by his 
will ; eternal power spoke to her in the 
rushing of the storm, as eternal mercy 
smiled on her in the sunlight of the seas. 

Strathmore, 



A 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 187 

MAN'S faithfulness has always such 
a different ending from a woman's. 

Wanda, 



SOLITUDE ! sweet to the youth who 
first suffers ; to the poet who finds 
in his thorn-crown his aureole ; to the 
lover who is half enamored and half proud 
of the fangs that devour him ; sweet to 
those. But to the man of the world, to 
the man past his youth, to the man whose 
last hope is dead with his last joy and last 
passion — solitude would be but the gate 

of the mad-house. 

Puck, 



o 



NE learns never to hope for the 
miracle of a charitable judgment. 
Lady Marabout' s Troubles, 



i88 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

FIDELITY Is the marriage bond of 
God, the laws of man cannot com- 
mand It, the laws of man are void with- 
out It. 

Granville De Vi^ne, 



HYPOCRITES weep, and you cannot 
tell their tears from those of saints; 
but no bad man ever laughed sweetly yet. 

Moths. 



ART Is the divlnlng-rod that will 
blossom like the almond-tree ; but 
it will be bare and barren If the magician 
himself half scoffs, and wholly doubts. 

PascareL 



FLASHES FROM '' OUTDAr 189 



O 



PALS are the jewels of calamity. 
Cecil Castlemaifie s Gage, 



*" I "HERE can never be too much cere- 
-i- mony. It preserves amiability, 
self-respect, and good manners. It Is the 
distinguishing mark between the gentle- 
man and the poor. 

Waiida, 



PARIS is the Aspasia of cities, but 
riorence is the Heloi'se ; upon the 
brilliancy of her genius and her beauty , 
there lies always the shadow of the clois- 
ter, and always the divinity of a great sac- 
rifice. 

PascareL 



I90 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

I HAVE always heard that Genius is 
something that they beat to death 
first with sticks and stones, and set upon 
a great rock to worship afterwards. 

Puck, 



BEFORE the presence of a threaten- 
ing death, life grows real, love grows 
precious, to the coldest and most careless. 

Under Two Flags, 



FRIENDSHIP is a sturdy plant, a 
sweet herb and a savory ; but when 
it touches the purse-strings, somehow it 
shrivels. 

Ariadne, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 191 



A GREAT teacher has said, ''The 
Humanities must outweigh the 
Science at all times." 

Wanda. 



A'' MASTERLY inactivity" is never 
so masterly as when it glues you fast 
to a good berth, no matter whether you're 
fit or unfit for it. 

Puck, 



AFTER all, there is virtue in content- 
ment, since contentment is satisfac- 
tion with one's lot ; there is far more vir- 
tue in endurance — strong, manful, steady, 
endurance — of a fate that is adverse, 
and one admitted to be such, but against 
which one fights hard. 

Granville de Vigne, 



192 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THE dawn awoke, the pine boughs 
were sun-bathed in the light ; the 
snowy surf was tossed upon the beach, the 
waves swept up with stately measure and 
broke in melodious murmur on the shore, 
and curlews flew through the fresh air. 
Earth, sky and ocean kept no record of 
their work, and over the sunken reef where 
the ship had found her grave the wild, 
blue waters, rearing in the sunbeam, broke 
in joyous, idle mirth, crested with snow- 
white foam. 

Strathmore, 



SO things pulseless and passionless en- 
dure, and human life passes away as 
swiftly as a song dies off from the air. 
Cecil Castlemaine s Gage, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 193 



IT needs a great nature to bear the 
weight of a great gratitude. 

In Marem7na, 



T GIVE thee the only thing without 



payment in this world — advice. 

F olle-F arine. 



c 



OURAGE is a mere gift of God. 

Wanda, 



T 



HE Devil is never so brutal as when 

he comes in a woman's form. 

Tricotrin» 
13 



194 FLASHES FROM *' OUlDAr 



THE snow upon the Apennines' crest 
looked like battlements of ivory 
around the citadel of God. 

In Maremma, 



HE was avaricious ; but many will 
honor a miser quicker than a 

spendthrift. 

Folle-Farine, 



IT ought to be difficult to make artifi- 
cial flowers. I wish it were impossible ; 

it is a blasphemy. 

Moths. 



THE woman makes or mars the man ; 
the man the woman. 

Signa, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



195 



THE long, tedious, sickly, friendless 
days, that drop one by one in their 
eternal sameness into the weary past, 
these kill slowly but surely, as the slow 
dropping of water frets away rock. 

B6bde, 



HE had the easy scorn of a modern 
student, yet for the old faith that 
moved the simple hearts of the women of 
his family he kept a reverent indulgence. 

In Maremina, 



HUMILIATION Is a guest that only 
comes to those who have made 
ready his resting-place and will give him 
a fair welcome. 

Puck, 



196 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 

ONCE in prison, you are forever down 
in the books of the police, and sub- 
ject to examinations and interrogation at 
any word or act that seems to them to be 
suspicious. You never wholly escape. 
You are as a bird let loose, and flying 
with a recall thread tied to its foot. Hu- 
man justice is a sadly deficient thing. 

A Village Commune, 



THERE is something in the silence of 
an empty room that sometimes has 
a terrible eloquence : it is like the look of 
coming death in the eyes of a dumb 
animal ; it beggars words, and makes them 
needless. 

Ariadne, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 197 



H 



E who likes nothing but books and 
pictures will never be alone. 

Wanda, 



HE held that a man's chief passion is 
his destiny, and will shape his fate, 
rough-hew his fate as circumstance or 

hazard may. 

Folle-Farine, 



ADVENTURESS! Adventurer ! 
That is the name the world gives 
any man or woman who dares to be 
clever, brilliant, or successful out of the 
old routine. 

Strathmore, 



198 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

WHEN the mildew is on the grain, 
who shall make it fair wheat 

again ? 

A Village Commune, 



« T;;^0REVER" is a word for fools; 
A even forbearance will not last '' for- 
ever" if it is tried too far. 

Strathmore, 



A MAN, be he bramble or vine, likes 
to grow in the open air in his own 
fashion ; but a woman, be she flower or 
weed, always thinks she would be better 
under glass. When she gets the glass, she 
breaks it — ^generally ; but until she gets it, 

she pines. 

PascareL 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



199 



GENIUS gives immortality in another 
sense than in the vulgar one of 
being praised by others after death ; it 
gives elasticity, unwearied sympathy, and 
that sense of some essence stronger than 
death, of some spirit higher than the tomb 
which nothing can destroy. It is in this 
sense that genius walks with the immortals. 

Moths. 



H 



UMANITY was born with weak 
nesses. 

Lady Marabout' s Troubles, 



o 



NLY life had taught him that love 

is the brother of death. 

Signa, 



200 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

TAKE to your 'bosom that flower 
alone which lives in the fullness of 
light, and folds no leaves unopened from 

your gaze. 

Idalia, 



HE knew that to those who go, for- 
getfulness is easy ; to those who 

stay, impossible. 

Szgna, 



FAME has only the span of a day, they 
say ; but to live in the hearts of the 

people — that is worth something. 

Szgna. 



H 



IS wife was his religion. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 201 

THEY had now come into the fragrant 
gloom of the forest, where the trees 
stood thick as bowmen in a fight in olden 
days, and the mountains rose behind them 
stern and blue, like tempest-clouds, while 
the silence was full of the fresh sound of 

rushing waters. 

Moths. 



WOMEN will not often see widely, 
but they see microscopically; 
they can not analyze, but they have in- 
valuable, rapid intentions. 

Strathmore, 



I THINK those who make war on 
women are no longer lit to fight with 

men. 

Under Tzvo Flags, 



202 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A." 

WE labor for the ideal, said the 
Florentines of old, lifting to 
heaven their red flower-de-luce, and to 
this day Europe bows before what they 

did, and cannot equal it. 

PascareL 



SOME people believe they have a 
conscience as they know they have 
a liver; but the liver troubles them some- 
times, the conscience is only a word. 

Moths. 



THE obligation of forgiveness Is to 
pardon offenses, Infidelity, unkind- 
ness, cruelty, but not dishonor. To pardon 

dishonor is to be dishonored. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUTDAr 203 



I 



F you have nothing to assume or to 
conceal, what cause have you to fear ? 
Beatrice Boville. 



WHY is it, I wonder, that a gloomy 
past often looks brighter than 
a brilliant present? What is there in 
the charm of Distance to give such a 

golden chiaro-oscuro ? 

Strathmore, 



I NEVER judge a man by his life, but 
by his heart ; circumstances make 
the one, but nature has formed the other ; 
and if it be the right metal it will always 

ring true. 

Belles and Blackcock, 



204 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

POETS are but men — men a little 
nearer to God and the truth than 

are others. 

Tricotrin, 



** ^ T "HE loveliest things in all creation 

-L are the sunrise and the moonlight ; 

and who has time in our stupid life, that 

is called pleasure, to see either of them ? " 

Moths, 



FOR in the latter years we throb all 
over wuth so many wounds that we 
have learned to value the hand that plucks 
a dockleaf for our nettle sting, though we 
know well no balm can heal the jagged 
rent in the breast no man sees. 

PascareL 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 205 



THE nights, perfect as they are, have 
scarcely more loveliness than the 
birth of light. The first rippling laughter 

of the early day. 

PascareL 



THERE were shadowed out in her the 
twin foes of all genius — the woman 

and the world. 

Signa. 



THE river ran by with a sweet song 
of its own ; the tranquil town 
seemed to sleep; the people, gathered 
below, were hushed and reverent ; the 
fresh glad wind that lives in Alpine forests 
swept by, bringing the scent of the pine- 
wood with it. 

Moths. 



2o6 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A." 

THERE is no coldness so unchanging, 
so unyielding, so absolute, as the 
coldness of one who loves what is lost. 

In Maremma, 



IT has been written that there is not 
one man without some gleam of 
tenderness and pity — it is not written 
there is not one woman. 

Puck, 



A WORD that needs compelling is 
broken by the heart before the lips 
gave it. It is to plant a tree without a 
root, to put faith in a man that needs a 
bond. 

Folle-Farine, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 207 

CREATURES that take out their 
grief in crape and mortuary tablets 

can't feel very much. 

Puck, 



I WONDER they choose early death 
as the gentlest fate ; to die in youth, 
to leave all the warmth of life for the 
loneliness of the grave, to grow blind to 
the light of the sun, and deaf to the voices 
we love, and to lie alone there dead, 
while the birds awaking and the wind is 
blowing over the flowers and the day is 
dawned for all but us ! Oh, who would 

choose it ? 

Strathmore, 



L 



OVE is a destiny. 

Wanda, 



2o8 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA," 

THE secret of being happy yourself 
lies in the capacity to be intensely 
disagreeable to other people. 

PucL 



SHE knew nothing of transmitted 
taint and hereditary influence, but 
her experience told her that what is bred 
in the bone comes out in the flesh. 

I71 Maremma. 



THE indifference to fortune of a man 
of genius is, to a man of the world, 
the stupor of idiocy ; from such a stu])or 
he will some day be shaken to find him- 
self face to face with beggary. 

Folk-Far ine. 



F'LASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 209 



TILL you cease to enjoy, you are 
ignorant how to endure. The 
bread of bitterness is the food on which 
men erow to their fullest stature : the 
waters of bitterness are the debatable food 
through which they reach the shores of 
wisdom : the ashes boldly grasped and 
eaten without faltering are the price that 
must be paid for the golden fruit of 
knowledoe. The swimmer cannot tell 
his strength till he has gone through the 
wild force of the opposing waves, the 
great man cannot tell the might of his 
hand and the power of his resistance till 
he has wrestled with the angel of adver- 
sity and held it close till it has blessed him. 

Chandos, 
14 



2IO FLASHES FROM ''OUIDA." 

DEEP feeling Is rare, but It does not 
follow that on that account it is 

unreal. 

Granville De Vzgne, 



LOVE— past or present — Is like a 
Jack-in-a-box, always jumping up 
when you think it screwed down. It is 
like dandelion seed for lightness, blowing 
away with a breath, and yet is like nettles 
for obstinacy ; there is no knowing when 

it is plucked up. 

Ckandos, 



NEVER forget that the greatest men 
of all nations sprang from the 

people. 

Chandos, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 211 



A 



ND is not the gold of the rich their 
own, as well as the crust of the poor ? 
In Maremma, 



NEITHER before nor after marriage 
would any man, who respected his 
wife, suffer curiosity or suspicion to enter 
into him. If he do he has no right to 
expect happiness, and he will certainly not 
go the way to get it. 

Beatrice Boville. 



T T takes a wise and a long head to have 
-^ a secret ! It is as dangerous as a 
packet of dynamite to most persons. 

Moths. 



212 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA. 



THE hills lie quiet and know no 
change ; the winds wander among 
the arbutus-bells and shake the odors 
from the clustering herbs ; the stone-pines 
scent the storm ; the plain outspreads its 
golden glory to the morning light ; the 
sweet chimes ring ; the days glide on ; the 
splendors of the sunsets burn across the 
sky, and make the mountains as the 

jeweled thrones of gods. 

Signa, 



THE cursing envy of the Irish or 
French poor is not in the Italian : if 
he can sit in the sun and cut a slice of 
melon in the Summer, a slice of sausage 
in Winter, he is content, and ready to 
laugh and be merry with you. 

A Village Qommune, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 213 

I NEVER knew a man who could not 
support with most philosophic indiffer- 
ence the cruelty of one woman if he had 
another to turn to, provided she had not 
left him for another man. 

Granville De Vigne, 



w 



HERE doubt has once come, faith 

is dishonored. 

Chandos, 



AIR is the king of physicians ; he who 
stands often with nothing between 
him and the open heavens will gain from 
them health, both moral and physical. 

In Maretnma, 



214 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



THERE is no cruelty with which pas- 
sion has not been alHed ; there is 
no vengeance so remorseless as that which 
has its birth in love that has turned to 

hate. 

Strathmore, 



COUNTRY folks believe In fair words 
as a panacea for all evils and ills, 
and a talisman against all peril and en- 
mity. 

A Village Commune, 



HE would do a kindness : not a very 
great virtue, perhaps ; but it is a 

rare one. 

Under Two Flags, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 215 

TRUTH is a gem that loves the deep, 
applies to truth metaphysical his- 
torical and philosophical ; but truth per- 
sonal is rather a flower like the brier- 
rose, too homely, too simple, and too 
thorny for men to care to gather it. 

Friendship, 



THE only time when a human soul is 
either wise or happy is in that one 
single moment when the hour of my own 
shining or of the moon's beaming seems 
to that single soul to be Past, Present and 
Future, and to be at once the creation 
and the end of all things. 

Bdbde, 



CONTENT slays ambition. 
Wanda, 



2i6 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA. 



THE imagination of man may be 
great, but it can never be at its 
greatest until one serpent, with merciless 
fangs, has bitten it through and through, 
and impregnated it with passion and with 
poison — that one deathless serpent which 

is memory. 

Folle-Farine, 



SHE despised herself; and there is no 
shame more bitter to endure. 

Moths, 



DISCUSSION may be the salt of 
life to a few, but listeners and echoes 
are the bon-bons and cigarettes that no 
woman can do without. 

In a Winter City. 



FLASHES FROM ''QUID A." 217 

FEW men can meet the eyes of a 
woman who loves them purely and 
faithfully, after a long absence, without 
some pangs of conscience, without some 
contrast of the quality of her fidelity and 

their own. 

Strathmore, 



A SUCCESSFUL man always ap- 
proves the world because the world 

has approved him. 

Stratkmore, 



WHEN a woman sees anything out 
of her window that makes her 
eager to look again, she always shuts the 
shutter. Why, I wonder ? 

A Provence Rose, 



2i8 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

RAGGI — perhaps with that divine 
pity which dogs have — divined the 
sad destiny of the cripple. 

A Village Commune, 



w 



HAT is death that it should give 
us leave to be unfaithful ? 

In Maremma, 



SHE was brave, self-reliant, and tender 
to all those creatures whom the 
human race, because it understands not 
their language, chooses to call dumb. Of 
the human beast she had not fear, but a 
great mistrust. 

In Maremma, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 219 



A WOMAN faithful will not even 
think that any can feel love for her, 
— save one : it is almost infidelity. 

Ariadne. 



LEARN to be silent. It is a woman's 
first duty, though her hardest. 

Bdbde, 



T3AST follies have present obligations, 



and old sins have long shadows. 

Ariadne. 



E 



VERY woman is, at heart, a Bohe- 
mian. 

Idalia. 



220 FLASHES FROM " OUIDA: 



I MUST keep my word to her; she 
is not living to release me." 

In Maremma, 



HER eyes were filled and shadowed 
with many altering thoughts. 

Under Two Flags, 



INDUSTRY and talent can never fail 
long to obtain recognition. 

A Village Commune, 



THERE is a wild and wayward des- 
tiny in life which ever loads fruition 
with satiety. 

Tricotrin, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 221 

AMILIARITY is no courtier, and 
time is always cruel. 

Wanda. 



M 



USIC is meant for silence. 

In a Winter City, 



A 



MOMENT is enough for love to be 
born. 

Wanda, 



HE was dead, like the child Itys, for 
whom his mother mourns through 
all the ages with every summer's eve. 

In Maremma. 



222 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA." 

I HATE silence myself! Thoughts 
are very good grain ; but if they are 
not whirled round, round, round, and 
winnowed In the millstones of talk, they 
keep little hard, useless kernels, that not 
a soul can digest. 

Under Two Flags, 



SHE needed to be alone — alone with 
the shadows, and the leaves, and 
wide waters and the green, wet plain, and 
all the things that told her she was free. 

In Maremma, 



COINCIDENCE is a god that greatly 
influences mortal affairs. 

Puck, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 223 

TRAGEDIES drift out of the memo- 
ries of men as wrecked ships sink 
from sight under a rising tide. ** Violent 
deh'ghts have violent endings ; " passion is 
not always love, nor even love always 
remembrance. 

In Maremma, 



ONE may be queen of all the world 
but not sovereign of one's self; and 
our hearts are like Ben Johnson's blow- 
balls — now here, now there, wherever the 
winds of chance and caprice like to float 

them. 

Strathmore, 



A 



SECRET, once disclosed, is like a 
bird once loosed. 

In Maremma, 



224 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

INSECURITY is to the passion as 
wind to the flame : without the cold 
breeze wafted to It, the embers will have 
faded fast and never flared up Into life ; 
with the rush of the cooler air, the fire leaps 
into flame, and its lust is not sated until 
it has destroyed all before it. 

Strathmore. 



DO not take what you cannot pay — 
that is the way to walk with pure 
feet. 

Bibde 



IT is harder to live well than to die 
well ; but that Is because dying is over 
so soon. 

Wanda. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 225 

THE Incessant talk about dress is so 
tiresome and vulgar. The women 
who want their costumes praised are ' 
women who have only just begun to dress 
tolerably, and are still not quite sure of the 
effects. 

In a Winter City. 



LADIES always wipe their pens as 
religiously as they bolt their bed- 
room doors, believe in comestics, and go 
to church on Sunday. 

Lady Maraboufs Troubles. 



o 



NLY cowards write to save them- 
selves from pain. 

Wanda. 

15 



226 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

HE enjayed ! Oh, golden sun of this 
world, sweet content ! Supreme 
truth of Faust ! When he should 

"To the passing moment say, 
Stay ! thou art so fair !" 

then the philosopher knew that he could 
claim to have tasted happiness. When 
once we look back or look forward, then 
has the trail of the serpent been over our 
Eden. To enjoy, we must live the in- 
stant we grasp. It is so easy for the 
preacher, when he has entered the days 
of darkness, to tell us to find no flavor in 
the golden fruit, no music in the song of 
the charmer, no spell in the eyes that look 
love, no delirium in the soft dreams of 
the lotus ; so easy, when these things are 
dead and barren for himself, to say they 
are forbidden ! But men must be far 



FLASHES FROM ''QUID A." 227 

more, or far less, than mortal, ere they 
can bind their eyes and dull their senses, 
and forswear their natures and obey the 
dreariness of the commandment ; and 
there is little need to force the sackcloth 
and serge upon us. The roses wither 
long before the wassail is over, and there 
is no magic that will make them bloom 
again, for there is none that will renew us 
— Youth. 

Ckandos, 



IT may be that a life led in atonement, 
is the life nearest to God, and most 

blessed by men. 

Tricotrin. 



OPPOSITION to a man In love, Is 
like oil to fire. 

Granville De Vigne, 



228 FLASHES FROM ''QUID A." 

THE evening had just followed on the 
glow of the day — evening, more lus- 
trous than ever, for the houses were all 
a-glitter with endless lines of colored 
lamps and strings of sparkling illumina- 
tions, a very sea of bright-hued fire. 

i Under Two Flags, 



DO your own business before noon, 
but don't be bored by your friends 
until after. 

Strathmore, 



HE knew the force of hereditary in- 
stincts, the strange and subtile 
influence of descent. 

In Maremma. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 229 



^ I "HE fatal desire of fame, which is to 
J- art the corroding element, as the de- 
sire of the senses is to love — bearing with 
it the seeds of satiety and morality — has 
entered into him without his knowing 
what it was that ailed him. 

Signa, 



TO the young everything is possible, 
to the old, nothing. 

Folle-Farine, 



I^TEVER combat a woman on her own 
^ ^ ground and with her own weapon — 

unselfishness ! The man must always lose 

in a conflict of that sort. 

Wanda, 



230 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

MEN sought him, houses opened to 
him, friends came around him; 
he was known ; and in that one word there 
lies for genius all the width that yawns be- 
tween heaven and hell. 

Puck, 



NO true artist ever yet worked for 
ambition. He does the thing 
which is in him to do by a force far 
stronger than himself. 

PascareL 



PATIENCE ! the lowliest stone may 
serve to bring to earth the loftiest 
bird that soars. 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 231 

IT was a picture, Rembrandt in color^ 
Oriental in composition, with the 
darkness surrounding It stretching out 
Into endless distance, that led to the 
mystic silence of the great desert, and 
above the intense blue of the gorgeous 
night, with the stars burning through 
white transparent mists of slowly drifting 
clouds. 

Under Two Flogs, 



PURE accident has the ruling of most 
of our lives ; but in concession to 
our weakness and our pride, we call It 
destiny, and we like to think its caprices 
are commands. 

Moths. 



232 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

I BE LI EVE that the knowledge of the 
world and of humanity, the extent 
of sympathy, and elasticity of pardon, are 

underrated. 

Wanda, 



NOW life is brutal ; and to none so 
brutal as to the aged, who remem- 
ber so well, and yet are forgotten as 
though already they were amid the dead. 

Under Two Flags, 



PUT your second frock on for the 
queen, if you like," she would say 
to the child, " but to the poor go in your 
best clothes, or they will feel hurt." 

Moths. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 233 



THE day smiles on us, but the night 
always seems fullest of God's love 
and pity. 

Strathmore, 



THAT which is jest to the well-born, 
can sting like a serpent what Is 
desolate and dependent. 

Tricotrin, 



PASSING the open door of church or 
cathedral, his thoughts pursued 
him, for the hot sun seemed streaming 
down upon the written law which guards 
the sanctity of life, and forbids Its golden 
cord to be cut asunder by the hand of 
man. 

Strathmore, 



234 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDA: 



A 



LL great men are happiest in stormy 
waters. 

A Village Commune, 



M 



EN are always what some woman 
or other makes them. 

Moths. 



LADIES are the exact antipodes of 
olives ; the one begins In salt, and 
leaves us blest with the delicious aroma ; 
the other, with all due deference, Is nectar 
to commence with (but how soon, though 
our own fault, entirely, of course), they 
turn Into gall! 

Granville De Vigne. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 235 



W" 



ERE two love, one is always 
selfish. 

Tricotrin. 



GENIUS possesses the power of spon- 
taneous and exquisite production 
without effort and with delight. 

The Child of Urbino, 



NO book is so eagerly read as the one 
you forbid us. 

Strathmore. 



r;j^RIENDSHIP needs to be rooted 
in respect. 

In Maremma, 



236 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THE man who puts chains upon 
another's limbs is only one shade 
worse than he who puts fetters on another's 
free thoughts, and on another's free con- 
science. 

Chandos. 



WE may lavish what we will — kindly 
thoughts, royal service, untiring 
aid, and generous deed — and they are all 
but as oil to the burning, as fuel to the 
flame, when spent upon those who are 

jealous of us. 

Chandos. 



I 



THINK adventure is like calamity: 
some people are born to it. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 237 

AN Englishman is always boxing or 

-^^. grumbling ; the two make up his 

life. 

Under Two Flags, 



A 



PASSIONATE sorrow for a human 
sorrow possessed her. 

Folle-Farine, 



SHE was a gentle-looking woman, with 
a very soft voice, which she never 
raised under any provocation. She had a 
will of steel, but she made it look like a 
blossoming and pliant reed ; she was very 
religious and strongly ritualistic. 

Moths. 



238 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



GREAT gifts need slight praise. 
Puck 



A FULL moon made the narrow sea a 
sheet of silver ; a high tide had 
carried the beach up to the edge of the 
black rocks ; in the white luminous space 
one little dark sail was slowly drifting be- 
fore the wind, the sail of a fishing or 
dredging boat. The calmness, the silence, 
the lustre, the sweet, fresh, strong sea- 
scent, so familiar to her in her childhood, 
filled her with an infinite melancholy. 

Moths, 



T 



I ME tempers every thing, and there 
are always consolations. 

Moths, 



T 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 239 

HE only thing In life whose sweet- 
ness never fails and cannot die Is 



vengeance. 

Strathmore, 



A 



MAN must talk, even when he is a 
holy one : that stands to reason. 
In Maremma, 



OTHER arts earth still mingles with 
and profanes ; passion is in the 
poet's words, the senses wake with the 
painter's voluptuous hues, and the sculptor 
dreams but of divine beauty of woman's 
form ; but with music the soul escapes all 
bondage, and rises where the world has no 
share, unclogged and unaccompanied. 

Tricotrin» 



240 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr \ 

' ■ — — ".] 

T WOMAN Is never too old to be 
averse to the thought that she can 
charm. 

Wanda, 



PEOPLE must make themselves 
agreeable to be agreeable to the 
world ; yea, and eat a good deal of dust, 
too ; if they are very high and mighty by 
birth, of course they can be as disagree- 
able as they choose. 

Friendship 



A JUST chastisement may benefit 
a man, though it seldom does ; but 
an unjust one turns all his blood to gall. 
A Village Commune, 



FLASHES FROM '^ OUTDA: 



241 



T^HEY who labor justly for the sheer 
-A sake of truth find no present re- 
ward ; will they hereafter find it ? A weary 
question, one to which men have never 
gained an answer. 

Chandos, 



T^ROM Paradise downward, feminine 
-*- interference was never productive 
but of a losing game for man. 

Strathmore, 



T^HERE is no ghost whose breath is 
J- so cold, as the ghost of a love that 
is dead. 

PascareL 
16 



242 FLASHES FROM " OUlDAr 

THERE are natures which in their 
anguish seek the fellowship of their 
kind as a wounded deer will seek his herd ; 
there are others which shun it as the 
stricken eagle soars aloft to die alone, 
howsoever the blood be dropping from his 

broken wings. 

Strathmore, 



FOR mothers never forget. That I 
am very sure. No, not though they 
sit on the right hand of God with His 

angels. 

PascareL 



H 



E stood silent, also unconscious that 
he was cruel, as men mostly are. 
In Maremma, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 243 

THERE is a silence of the mountains 
that is beautiful beyond all other 
beauty. There is another silence of the 
mountains that is lonely beyond all other 
loneliness. 

Szgna, 

LYING is gossip ; debt is momentary 
embarrassment ; immorality is a little 
slip, and so forth ; and when we have 
arranged this pretty little dictionary of 
convenient pseudonyms, it is not agreeable 
to have it sent flying. 

Friendship, 



TO greet a new fear with a smile and 
not a sigh, one must be tranquil at 
least, if not happy. 

A Provence Rose, 



244 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

SOCIETY — that smooth and sparkling 
sea — is excessively difficult to navi- 
gate ; its surf looks no more than cham- 
pagne foam, but a thousand quicksands 
and shoals lie beneath ; there are breakers 
ahead for more than half the dainty pleas- 
ure-boats that skim their hours upon it, 
and the foundered lie by millions, for- 
gotten, five fathoms deep below. 

Chandos, 



WOMAN always runs away to be 
run after, and if you do not pursue 
her, she comes back — always. 

BMe, 



V I' s 



EN the thoughts rebel, the acts 
soon revolt. 

Wanda. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 245 



" I "HERE is nothing In after-times, 
J- however radiant with pleasure or 
success those latter times may be, so per- 
fectly happy as the buoyant and fearless 
ignorance of the creature who has just 
left childhood for youth, just thrust out 
its hand from the shell of dependence and 
ventured alone to survey with dazzled and 
delighted eyes the illimitable domain that 
lies in the mere possible. 

PascareL 



IF there were only a single rose, here 
and there upon earth, men and women 
would pass their years on their knees be- 
fore Its beauty. I wonder sometimes if 
human ingratitude for beauty ever hurts 
God ? One might fancy even Deity 
wounded by neglected gifts. 

Moths. 



246 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



W 



HEN a woman Is handsome, she 
is never denied. 

Under Two Flags. 



ALL things fall into the grave of time, 
which, ever full, yet ever yawns for 

more. 

Strathmore, 



FEW are so deeply lost that an Infi- 
nite mercy cannot do something to 
restore them. 

Strathmore, 



F 



OR an instant remembrance held her 
in its thrall. 

Puck. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 247 

A WELL-KNOWN writer has said, 
" Genius is the power of taking 
pains." 

The Child of Urbino, 



GENIUS cannot escape the taint of 
its time, more than a child the 
influence of its begetting. 

Ariadne, 



FEAR took the place of that exalta- 
tion which had sustained her sinking 
limbs so far — the nameless fear which 
comes on all free forest things when they 
are driven to approach a city. 

In Maremma, 



248 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

"'\70U must await the Peruvian Para- 
A dise. Meanwhile, there is a day- 
spring that represents the sun not ill ; we 
call it wealth." 

Folle-Farine, 



SOME persons are always looking for 
a four-leaved shamrock. In that sort 
of search, life slips away unperceived ; one 
is very soon left alone with one's dead 

leaves. 

Wanda, 



HER eyes were blinded with the 
celestial beauty of a love that 
asked for itself nothing more on earth or 
heaven than this life it had. 

In Maremma, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 249 

TO wait for happiness is a living death ; 
to hope for it is a dreamer's phan- 
tasy. 

Granville De Vigne, 



NINE-TENTHS of creatures In this 
world don't know how to put on a 
glove. It's an art, and an art that requires 
long study. 

Ufider Two Flags: 



TELL a man wine Is good for him, 
and forbid him water, he will for- 
swear his cellar and run to the pump im- 
mediately. 

Granville De Vigne, 



250 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

BUT painters, if one chance to please 
them at all, always see so many 
types in one's face, all more or less contra- 
dictory of each other, that one comes to 
the irresistible conclusion that it must after 
all be typical of the poor human nature 
which makes us all akin — when it does not 
set us all at strife. 

Pascarel. 



WHEN a man's eyes meet yours, 
and his faith trusts you, and his 
heart upon a vague impulse is laid bare to 
you, it always has seemed to me the 
basest treachery the world can hold, to pass 
the gold of confidence which he pours out 
to you from hand to hand as common coin 
for common circulation. 

Pascarel, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 251 

IRCUMSTANCE is so odd and so 
cruel a thing. It is wholly apart 
from talent. 

PascareL 



c 



DEATH appalls at all ages the Latin 
temperament. 

In Maremma, 



ICTURES, like beauties, kill each 
other. 

PucL 



COUNT art by gold, and it fetters 
the feet it once winged. 

PascareL 



252 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THE philosopher stands at his desk in 
the lecture-hall, and demonstrates 
away the soul of man, and, with exact 
thought, measures out his atoms and 
resolves him back to gas and air. The 
revolutionary below in the crowd, hears, 
and only translates what he hears thus to 
his brethren : *' Let us drink while we 
may ; property is robbery, this life is all ; 
let us kill and eat ; there is no God." 

A Village Commune, 



SCANDALS are like dandelion-seeds : 
a breath scatters them to the four 
winds of heaven ; but they are arrow- 
headed, and stick where they fall, and 
bring forth and multiply fourfold. 

Chandos. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr '253 

SHE liked best to be alone and to be 
always in movement ; she never 
cared to be still, except in the church 
where there was a requiem or a choral 
mass, and the sounds went floating away 
into the dark dimly-lit place and mingled 
with the sounds of the seas and the winds 

without. 

In Maremma, 



THE recovery of existence always en- 
hances its savor, 

Wanda. 



E 



OVE is born as much of scenic effects 
as of the senses. 

Wanda. 



254 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THE strings were touched by an artist 
hand, and all that duller ears heard, 
but dimly, In the splash and surge of the 
brown fern-covered stream, he heard in 
marvelous poems and translated with 
clearer tongue, the universal tongue which 
has no country and no limit, and which 
the musician speaks alike to sovereign and 

to savage. 

Tricotrin. 



WHERE there Is hatred of one or 
of the other, true judgment is 
possible of neither. 



Ariadne. 



T 



O slander his neighbor Is Indirectly 
to flatter your listener. 

Chandos, 



FLASHES FROM ^'OUIDAr 255 



GREECE cannot die! No matter 
what the land be now, Greece — our 
Greece — -must Hve forever. Her language 
lives : the children of Europe learn it, 
even if they halt it in imperfect numbers. 
The greater the scholar the humbler he 
still bends to learn the words of wisdom 
from her schools. The poet comes to her 
for all his fairest myths, his noblest mys- 
teries, his greatest masters. The sculp- 
tor looks at broken fragments of her 
statues, and throws aside his calliope in 
despair before these matchless wrecks. 
From her, soldiers learn how to die, and 
nations how to conquer and keep their 
liberties. No deed of heroism is done 
but, to crown it, it is named parallel to 
hers. They write of Love, and who for- 
gets the Lesbian ? They dream of free- 
dom, and to reach it, they remember 
Salamis. They talk of progress, and 



256 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



while they talk, they sigh for all they have 
lost in Academus. They seek truth, and 
while they seek wearily along, as little 
children, to hear the golden speech of 
Socrates, that slave, fisherman, sailor, 
stone-mason and date-seller were all once 
free to hear in her Agora. But for the 
light that shone from Greece in the break- 
ing of the Renaissance, Europe would 
have perished in its Gothic darkness. 
They call her dead ; she can never die 
while her life, her soul, her genius, 
breathe fire into the new nations, and 
give their youth all of greatness and of 
grace that they can claim. Greece dead ! 
She reigns in every poem written, in 
every art pursued, In every liberty won, 
in every godlike life, and godlike death, 
in your fresh lands, which, but for her, 
would be barbarian now. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 257 

FAME ! It is the flower of a day, that 
dies when the next sun rises. But 
to do something, however little, to free 
men from their chains, to aid something, 
however faintly, the rights of reason and 
of truth, to be unvanquished through all 
and against all, — these may bring one 
nearer the pure ambition of youth. 

Chandos, 



NO weapon, not even the anointed 
one can turn aside the devilish hate 
of envy. 

Wanda. 



-\\ 



GAVE you ten-fold more than love: 
gave you trust." 

Tricotrin. 



258 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 



EVERY woman has a heart, even the 
worst women, though to be sure, we 
forget it sometimes, until we've broken 
them. 

Ckandos. 



THE loveliest thing in all the world is 
courage that goes hand in hand with 
mercy ; and these two together can work 
miracles like magicians. 

The Little Earl, 



I HOPE earth is but an antechamber 
which we pass through, and fill with 
beautiful things, or befoul with dust and 
blood at our own will. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 259 

THE gleam of the dawn spread In one 
golden glow of morning, and the 
day rose radiant over the world. 

Under Two Flags, 



THERE is no more disastrous destiny 
under the sun than to be made 
ridiculous. 

Moths. 



MEN are very much in society as 
women will them to be. Let a 
woman's society be composed of men 
gently-born -and bred, and If she find them 
either coarse or stupid, make answer to 
her : "■ You must have been coarse or 
stupid yourself." 

Puck, 



26o FLASHES FROM '' OUlDAr 

SOCIETY is a crucible in which all 
gold melts. Out of it is drawn only 
one or two prizes — vanity or disgust. 

Ariadne, 



E 



VERY woman becomes half a clair- 
voyant when she is in love. 

Lady Marabout' s Troubles, 



BECAUSE the flax and the laleza 
blossom for use, and the garden- 
flowers grow trained and pruned, must 
there be no bud that opens for mere love 
of the sun, and swings free in the wind in 
its fearless, fair fashion ? Believe me, it 
is the lives which follow no previous rule, 
which do the most good. 

Under Two Flags, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 261 

IS It true that a great love must be as 
exhaustless as the ocean in Its mercy 
and as profound in its comprehension ? 

Wanda. 



A SINGLE word ill said is often the 
little rift within the lute which 
makes the music dumb. 

Wanda, 



L 



OVERS are like husbands, they con- 
done. 

Moths, 



AME IS capricious, but failure is 
seldom inconstant. 

Fame, 



262 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

WITH a book, like a man, the lack 
of pedigree matters nothing, if the 
pages within be writ fair. 

Tricotrin, 



A SPANISH blonde is the greatest 
marvel of beauty that the world 

ever sees. 

Stratkmore, 



A STATESMAN rules for a life-time, 
but it is only the poet whose sceptre 
stretches over generations unborn. 

Tricotrin, 



A HERO or a king grows as helpless 
as a lame beggar when he is ill. 

Wanda, 



FLASHES FROM ''GUI DA. 



263 



I ^HERE is a vast error in which the 
-A- world believes — that gamesters are 
moved by the lust of gain only, by the 
desire of greed, by the longing of avarice. 
It is not so; the money won they toss 
back without an instant's pause, to risk its 
loss at venture. Avarice is no part of the 
delirium that allures them with so ex- 
haustless a fascination ; the spell that 
binds them is the hazard. Give a game- 
ster thousands, he cares for the gold only 
to purchase with it that delicious, feverish, 
intoxicating charm of chance. There is a 
delight in its agony, a sweetness in its in- 
sanity, a drunken, glorious intensity of 
sensation in its limitless swing between a 
prince's treasures and a beggar's death, 
which lends life a sense never known 
before. 

Chandos, 



264 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

WOMEN scorn a timid lover ; 
though slyness is the best tribute 
to their own power, you never can get 
them to appreciate it. 

Tricotrin, 



I LIKE people with weaknesses ; those 
without them do look so dreadfully 
scornfully and unsympathizingly upon 
one from the altitude of their superiority. 
Lady Marabout's Troubles, 



A FIRM will sheathed in soft phrases 
is a power never resisted in a little 
household, or in the world of men. 

Signa, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 265 



THERE is nothing upon earth, I 
think, like the smile of Italy as she 
awakes when the winter has dozed itself 
away in the odors of its oak-wood fires. 
The whole land seems to laugh. The 
spring-tide of the north is green and beau- 
tiful, but it has nothing of the radiance, 
the dreamfulness, the ecstasy of spring in 
the southern countries. The spring-tide 
of the north, with the gentle, colorless 
sweetness of its world of primroses : the 
spring-tide of Italy is rainbow-hued like 
the profusion of anemones that laugh with 
it in every hue of glory under every 
ancient wall and beside every hill-fed 
stream. Spring in the north is a child 
that wakes from dreams of Death ; spring 
in the south is a child that wakes from 
dreams of Love. One is rescued and 



266 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

welcomed from the grave ; but the other 
comes smiling on a sunbeam from heaven. 

PascareL 



THERE is a chord in every human 
heart that has a sigh in it if touched 
aright. When the artist finds the key- 
note which that chord will answer to, in 
the dullest as in the highest, then he is 

great. 

Signa, 



TO die when life can be lived no longer 
with honor, is greatness indeed ; but 
to die because it galls, and wearies and is 
hard to pursue — there is no greatness in 
that ! it is the suicide's plea for self-pity. 

Tricotrin. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 267 



T 



HE swan must suffer before he sings. 
Granville De Vigne, 



MOZART loved his wife, but It was 
not of his wife he thought when he 
was dying. It was of his requiem. 

Signa, 



HER eyes had a blind, unconscious 
look In them, like those of eyes 
that have recently lost their sight and are 
not yet used to the eternal darkness. 

Moths. 



w 



AITING heightened the Imagina- 
tion and spurred expectancy. 

Signa, 



268 FLASHES FROM ''OUIDA: 



THOSE who are happy, die before 
their dreams. 

Signa, 



-L' itself 



OVE kills everything and then dies 

Signa, 



IN men and women Love waking wakes 
with himself the soul. 

Signa, 



SINCERE love can be no insult to 
whomsoever proffered. 

Cecil Castlemaine s Gage, 



T 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 269 

HE night Is perfect, all the hillside Is 
hushed In an Intense stillness. 

PascareL 



H 



UMAN life seems so small beside 
the vast life of universal creation. 
Granville De Vigne, 



A HOUSE has its moral atmosphere 



as a city has. 

Frescoes. 



A 



S there is love without dominion, so 
there is dominion without love. 

Moths, 



270 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

I HAVE heard much of the acute vis- 
ion of love ; but love has always 
seemed to me to be as blind as ten thou- 
sand bats. 

Frescoes, 



IN life there are so many histories 
which are like broken boughs that 
strew the ground, snapped short at either 
end, so that none knew the crown of 
them, nor the root. 

Folle-Farine, 



A N angel comes once in their lives to 
F~\. most men : seldom do they know 
their visitants, often do they thrust the 
door against it. 

Ariadne, 



FLASirES FROM '' OUIDAr 271 

COULD we foresee one step before 
another, would the lives of any of 
us be blasted, blundered, full of bitterness 
and of evil as they are ? Is not the mis- 
ery of every life due to the band that Is 
bound fast on our eyes, which the wisest 
can do little to lift, which makes us feel 
our way blindly, uncertainly, errlngly, 
stumbling at every step, , which is never 
lifted save when our faces are turned 
backward and we are bidden t© look behind 
us at the land we have quitted, which Is 
sown thick with graves ; and at the gates 
which are closed upon us on which is 

written, '* Too Late." 

Strathmore, 



FALSE sentiment is almost worse 
than none at all. 

Wanda, 



272 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

I NEVER do favor saying- things to a 
woman that a man would knock you 
down for. 

Frescoes, 



NOTHING looks so sweet to us as 
a lost home in which a stranger 
is installed. 

PucL 



THE exquisite and mysterious music 
of that human voice seemed to bring 
with it the echo of a heaven forever lost. 

Moths, 



E 



CCENTRIC! I am not genius 
enough for that." 

Under Two Flags, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 273 



A WOMAN who knows her power 
can always tax any negligence to 
her as heavily as she likes. 

Strathmore. 



MYSTERY is to the tongue of the 
story-teller as butter to the hungry 
mongrel ; but what is simple is passed 
over by human mouths as daisies by the 
grazing horse. 

Signa, 



IF one be a man and has a shred of 
honor, one must He so often ; so sel- 
dom is there any other way that serves a 
woman. 

PascareL 



274 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



MARRIAGE Is a disagreeable legal 
necessity for a man with titles and 
entails, and the best color for a wife is a 
discreet plainness. 

Strathmore, 



IS there a more pitiable spectacle than 
that of a wife contending with others 
for that charm in her husband's sight 
which no philters and no prayers can re- 
new when once it has fled ? Love is a 
bird's song — beautiful and eloquent — 
when heard in forest-freedom, harsh and 
worthless in repetition, when sung from 
behind prison-bars. You cannot secure 
love by vigilance, by environment, by cap- 
tivity. 

Wanda. 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 275 



A LL sound things are simple. It is 
^^~^ the sham and rotten ones that want 
an intricate scaffolding to keep them from 
falling. 

Idalza, 



THEN swiftly, suddenly, the sun sank ; 
the twilight passed like a gray, glid- 
ing shade, an instant, over earth and sea 
and night, the balmy, sultry, star-studded 
night of Africa fell over the thirsty leaf- 
age longing for its dews; the closed 
flowers that slumbered at its touch ; the 
seared and blackened plains to which its 
coolness could bring no herbage, the mas- 
sive hills that seemed to lie so calmly in 
its rest. 

Under Two Flags. 



276 FLASHES FROM '' QUIDAr 

POOR candor! It is never right. If 
agreeable, It Is denounced as flattery, 
if distasteful, it is slighted as censure. 

Tricotrin, 



MEN are always inclined to be piti- 
ful to the woes of a woman when 
they are not woes which they themselves 
have caused. They will stone away with- 
out mercy a womanr whom they themselves 
have wounded, but for the victim of an- 
other man they are quick to be moved to 
tenderness and indignation. 

Friendship, 



SOCIETY is a soil you cannot weed 
too vigorously. 

Chandos, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUTDAr 277 



WHAT she wanted was to live. 
Live as the great moor bird did 
that she had seen float one day over these 
pale, pure, blue skies, with its mighty 
wings outstretched in the calm gray 
weather ; which came none knew whence, 
and which went none knew whither : which 
poised silent and stirless against the 
clouds ; then called with a sweet wild 
love-note to its mate, and waited for him 
as he sailed in from the misty shadows 
where the sea lay ; and then with him rose 
yet higher and higher in the air ; and 
passed westward clearing the fields of 
light, and so vanished: a queen of the 
wind, a daughter of the sun ; a creature 
of freedom, of victory, of tireless move- 
ment and of boundless space ; a thing of 
heaven and of liberty. 

Folle-Farine. 



278 FLASHES FROM " OUJDAr 

THE philosopher may cry to the 
winds, " Love Virtue for its own 

sake." 

A Village Commune, 



LOVE has turned to crime in its 
agony more than once since the 

world began. 

Strathmore, 



CONTENT is the secret of health. 
Wanda. 



I 



T is a face that tells a story, but a story 
whose leaves are uncut. 

Strathmore, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 279 



TO be wise in this world one should be 
blind to the sunset, but never to the 
people that bow. The sun, neglected, will 
not freckle us any more than if we had 
penned him a thousand sonnets as the lord 
of light. A man or a woman, slighted, 
will burn us brown all over with blistering 
spots of censure, indelible as stains of 
iodine and deep as wounds of vitriol. 

Friendship, 



ACTIVE persecution and fierce chas- 
tisement are tonics to the nerves; 
but the most weary conviction that no one 
cares, that no one notices, that there is no 
humanity that honors, and no duty that 
pities, is more destructive of all higher 
effort than any conflict with tyranny or 

with barbarism. 

Moths. 



28o FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

NIGHT holds dreams and passions 
that fade and flee before the lucid 
noon ; and who at noon-day wishes not 
for night ? 

Wanda, 



THE poor can understand criminal 
law and its justice and its necessity 
easy enough, and respect its severities : 
but they cannot understand the petty 
tyrannies of civil law, and it wears their 
lives out and breaks their spirits. When it 
does not break their spirits it curdles their 
blood and they become Socialists, Nihil- 
ists, Internationalists, anything that will 
promise them riddance of their spectre 
and give them vengeance. 

A Village Commune, 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 281 



THE little pleasant courtesies, affa- 
bilities, generosities and kindnesses 
that rub the edge off the flint-stones of 
the Via Doloroso, are quite beneath the 
attention of Mary the Saint. 

Lady Marabout' s Troubles, 



HIS yearning to work out expiation 
through the living to the dead, was 
holy in its remorse ; such may well claim 
to wash away and to atone for the dead- 
liest sin that can rest upon the soul of 
man ; but — this is the greatest evil which 
lies in evil, that the ashes of past guilt 
are too often the lava of fresh guilt, and 
one crime begets a brood, which, brought 
to birth, will strangle the life in which 
they were conceived. 

Strathmore, 



282 FLASHES FROM '^ OUIDAr 



I WOULD rather have any one I did 
not respect for an enemy than for a 

friend. 

Moths. 



T 



O quarrel with happiness is to quarrel 
with God. 

Signa, 



A MAN is never great in public life 
until he has ceased to care for a 

woman. 

Strathmore. 



iy /T EN are tender to women for remem- 
died out of them. 



brance' sake lono- after all love has 

o 



PascareL 



I 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 283 

NDIFFERENCE is always strength. 

Moths, 



AS passion yet unknown thrills the 
adolescent, as maternity yet un- 
dreamed-of stirs in the maiden, so the 
love of art comes to the artist before he 
can give a voice to his thoughts or a name 

to his desire. 

Signa, 



^^TTTHAT have you seen?" she 
V V asked, at last. '' I have seen 
Death, and it is beautiful," the child an- 
swered, wearily. '' Beautiful ! " said Jacon- 
da. *' Child, you have not seen what you 

love die." 

In Maremma, 



284 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

WOMEN shall honor great ability, 
shall behold true manliness, shall 
be worshipped with knightly reverence, 
shall be assailed by all the splendor of 
intellect, shall be wooed by all daring and 
all humility, and yet shall remain cold, 
and as untouched as marble In a quarry. 
And then there shall come one who has 
this magic gift — this wand that wakes the 
sleeping senses, this rose that slipped Into 
the bosom, banishes all peace, this power 
of love incarnated, and though the magi- 
cian be faithless as the wind, and rootless 
as the wind-born flower, yet in him alone 
forever shall be her heaven and her hell. 

Friendship, 



N 



O one likes to be twitted with turn- 
ing theories into actions. 

Chandos, 



FLASHES FROM " OUIDAr 285 

PLEASANTNESS is the soft note 
of this generation, just as scientific 
assassination is the harsh note of it. The 
age is compounded of the two. Half of 
it is chloroform. The other half is dyna- 
mite. We are neither brilliant, powerful 

nor original. 

Friendship, 



YOU are children, all of you, nothing 
but children, and if the toy that 
pleases you best is death, why — you must 

have it. 

Under Two Flags, 



R 



OME is the Mater Dolorosa, the 
Mother of Consolation. 

Frescoes, 



286 FLASHES FROM " OUIDAr 

TO a rich man you may refuse what 
you like, but to a poor man you 
must leave the pleasure of giving what 

he can. 

Idalia, 



I ''IMPLY" nothing; it is the most 
cowardly word in the language. 

Idalia, 



I NEVER knew any use that monarchs 
were yet, save in some form or another 

to tax their subjects. 

Idalia, 



POLITICS is the hospital for broken 
scoundrels. 

Idalia, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUlDAr 287 



FANCY the barbarism of crystallizing 
a violet ! The flower of Clemence 
Isaure and all the poets after her, con- 
demned to the degradation of becoming a 
bon-bon ! Can anything be more typical 
of the prosaic atrocity of the age ? Im- 
possible ! 

Idalia. 



AH ! how wicked it is that a mere 
earthly beauty of form can touch us 
and win us, as never can all the spiritual 
beauty of the saints. 

Idalia, 



F 



OLLY ! Fidelity I synonyms for love. 

Idalia. 



288 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



THERE are few lives without pain, 
and none without reproach. 

Idalia. 



WHEN the light of love is faded, 
and its joys are over, its duties 
and its mercies remain. Because one of 
the twain has failed in these, the other is 
not acquitted of obligation. 

Wanda, 



KEEP only such pride as shall ever 
rise above all taint of falsehood or 
of meanness, and gain you that true dig- 
nity — a stainless name. 

Tricotrin, 



FLASHES FROM '^ OUIDAr 289 



/^ NE pays for glory. 



The Ambitious Rose-Tree, 



A 7[ T' ERE there any entanglements 
V V before people took to writing 
letters ? 

Friendship, 



SOME people would rather be insult- 
ed than unperceived. 

Friendship, 



NOTHING wears so badly and 
stands the microscope as humanity. 
Strathmore, 



290 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

IT is one of the privileges of celebrity 
that the person celebrated can never 
wash his hands or open an umbrella with- 
out being accredited with some occult 
reason for his proceedings. 

Friendship, 



HALF the world mar their own lives, 
and the other half are marred by 
life. 

Stratkmore, 



" y\ ND perhaps God will let me die 
^l\ soon," she thought, with her child- 
ish fancy that God was near and Death an 
angel. 

Moths, 



4 
FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 291 



00 rashly do men judge who draw in- 
^^ ferences from the surface, so erringly 
do they condemn who see not the soHtude 
wherein the soul is laid bare. 

Strathmore. 



TTER love was her religion. Fools 
J- A may say what they will, there is 
none holier. 

In Maremma, 



HE who plants a green tree in a city 
way, plants a thought of God in 
many a human heart, arid with the dust of 
travail, and clogged with the greeds of 
gold. 

A Provence Rose, 



292 FLASHES FROM " QUID A." ' 

A CERTAIN peace and light fell 
on the people at their toil. 

Stgna, 



GOLD must be power always, and 
without power what is life ? 

Folle-Farine, 



IT is the noblest natures that tyranny 
drives to frenzy. 

A Village Commune, 



A GREAT wrong is to the nature as a 
cancer is to the body — there is no 
health. 

A Village Commune,^ 



FLASHES FROM ''OUIDAr 293 



TO-DAY succeeds to yesterday, and 
the dead are supplanted and forgot- 
ten ! Where the viaticum last night was 
administered to the dying, the laugh of 
the living echoes gayly this morning, and 
in its turn the laugh will die off the air, 
and the chant of the tomb will come 
round again. Such is life and such is 
death, and the two are ever fused together 
and twisted in one inseparable cord, the 
white line running with the black, side by 
side, crossed and re-crossed, following each 
other as the night the day. 

Strathmore, 



T)ITILESS himself, he abhorred pity, 
■A- and, if he yielded little mercy to 
misery, he asked none for his own. 

Strathmore, 



294 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

THE state should never quarrel with 
the churches, they alone can bind a 
band on the eyes of the poor, and, like the 
lying watchman, cry above the strife and 
storm of the sad earth, ''All is well." ''AH 

is well." 

Signa, 



YOUTH flattered into vanity is ruined. 
Strathmore. 



THE ocean is a music that is never 
silent, a poem that is never ex- 
hausted. 

Strathmore. 



T 



RIFLES play the deuce with us. 

Strathmore. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUlDAr 295 



T N love there is always one that can 
A hurt the other : it is the one that 
loves least. 

Ariadne. 



THE sea was near enough to give the 
sweet sense of its companionship, 
and if she climbed the sandstone only a 
little way and overlooked the darksome 
stretch of myrtle and oak-shrub, she could, 
at any moonlit hour, see it sparkling 
underneath the stars, flowing away into 
the infinite space of the clouds, and the 
night, phosphorescent, radiant, hushed. 

In Ma7^e7n7na, 



-A 



COMMON teacher, madame — 
Necessity." 



Under Two Flazs. 



296 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

NEITHER priest nor judge can 
efface a past as you clean a slate 
with a sponge. 

Wanda, 



EVERY tender-hearted woman feels 
regret for affection she is obliged 
to repulse, even when she does not return 

it. 

Lady Marabouf s Troubles, 



*' XT EVER swear, Seraph, not ever so 
^ ^ mildly," yawned Cecil ; ** it's gone 
out, you know; only the cads and the 
clergy can damn one now-a-days ; it's 
such bad style to be so impulsive." 

Under Two Flags, 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 297 



T)E calm and strong were words of 
-LI wisdom, but life cannot always be 
guided by wisdom. 

A Village Co7nmune, 



THE world, great liar though it be, is 
often-times deceived. 

Strathmore. 



MEN are children: thwart them and 
they pine. 

Wanda. 



T HAVE many to love me — in a way. 
-I But none to pray, that I know of; 
that is another affair. 

Moths. 



298 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

NONE desert truth without seeing 
that she would have been their 
noblest friend. Only often it is too late 
when they do see it. Once driven away 
with the scourge of lies, she is very hard 

to call back. 

Signa. 



w 



OMEN and dogs may forgive ; 
not men. 

Sig7ia, 



ARE we ever truly read, save by the 
one that loves us best ? Love is 
blind, the phrase runs ; nay, I would. rather 
say. Love sees as God sees, and with in- 
finite wisdom has infinite pardon. 

PascareL 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



299 



A CHILD'S feet are bruised and 
^^~^ stumble on the sharp stones of a 
hard, physical, unintelligible fact. 

Signa, 

/^""^ ORALS, pink and delicate, rivet the 
^^-^ continents together; joy tendrils, 
that a child may break, hold Norman 
walls with bonds of iron ; a little ring, a 
toy of gold, a jeweller's bagatelle, forges 
chains heavier than the galley-slave's ; so 
a look may fetter a lifetime. 

Ckandos. 



POSSESSION is the murderer of 
J- human love ; but of artistic love, it 

is the very crown and chaplet, unfading 

and life-renewing. 

Ariadne. 



300 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 

PLIANT temper, according to the 
temperature In which It dwells, 
becomes either harmless or worthless. 

Moths, 



AS the wheat ripened but to meet the 
k- sickle ; as the nuts grew but to fall ; 
as the leaves turn to gold but to wither; 
so the sanguine hope, the fond ambition 
of men, strengthened and matured only to 
fade into disappointment and destruction. 
Cecil Castlemaines Gage, 



VICE Is very common, and wit Is very 
scarce ; fifty men make mischief to 

one that makes mots. 

Strathmore. 



FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 301 

YOU never influence people if you 
don't like the things they like. 

Moths, 



A GREAT deal of the sin in this 
world, which is not at all like Lady 
Macbeth's, comes from the want of excite- 
ment, felt by persons only too numerous, 
who have exhausted excitement in its 
usual shapes. 

Wanda, 



THE noblest spirits are always the 
quickest ones to rebel against injus- 
tice and resent false accusations. 

Beatrice Boville, 



302 FLASHES FROM '' OUIDAr 



WHERE you are content it were 
folly to seek a change. 

Cecil Castlemaine s Gage. 



WE all have a million of friends as 
long as we are happily ignorant 
of what they say of us. 

Strathmore, 



T 



HE first-fruits of a man's genius are 
pure of greed. 



PascareL 



NO gre; 
thine. 



great talker ever did any great 
A Village Commune, 



FLASHES FROM *' OUIDAr 303 



MUSIC has nothing to do with earth, 
but sighs always for the lands be- 
yond the sun. 

PascareL 



THE woodland had that beauty 
amidst which idle speech seems 
profanation. 

Moths, 



THERE are no eyes that speak more 
truly, none on earth that are more 
beautiful, than the eyes of a horse. They 
sadly put to shame the million human 
eyes that so fast learn the lie of the world. 
Under Two Flags, 



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